We started with pistols, Kerry has good form here. A box-stock Glock 17, everything you need and nothing you don't:
Josh takes a turn with his Para Ordinance. Good recoil control here, notice that even with two spent casings in the air you can draw a line from his eyes right through the sights. This is how its supposed to be done:
The table in the background was set up as a barricade. Putting accurate fire on target while keeping as much of your body as possible behind cover is more difficult than it sounds, and not something easily practiced without physical objects to hide behind.
We moved on to rifles. I took a turn behind my old warhorse M4:
We test fired a customer's pre-89 Polytech as well. If you need proof that guns are good investments here it is-- these guns sold for $175 to $250 before they were banned from importation in 1989. In its current configuration, with underfolding spike bayonet, you could sell this Polytech for $1500 without much difficulty.
Erik brought an FN Tactical Police Shotgun which we all naturally just HAD to try. For a pump it didn't recoil very much, due to the barrel porting, recoil-assisted pump action, and its significant weight. I dutifully snapped away as paper targets downrage were pulverized.
Here you can see the barrel porting at work, venting expanding gas from the fired round upwards, thereby pushing the barrel down and cutting down on recoil:
As Josh pumps the action the spent hulls are still smoking:
We spent the rest of the session doing a couple of unorthodox prone positions, urban prone and reverse prone, which are handy to know but difficult to practice. Here, a cardboard box takes the place of a street curb for purposes of the drill. Laying on your back and shooting from behind a street curb is uncomfortable, but not nearly as much as standing straight up and being ventilated by the bad guys!
After seeing me run drills with the Microtech STG556, Kerry had to have a try. Though based on the Steyr AUG which has been in service since 1977, this is the carbine of the future as far as I'm concerned, and made in the USA to boot!
Kerry still prefers his trusty M4. Old habits die hard.
The last drill we did was the infamous "under the car" drill. You have to get extremely low, turn the rifle sideways and struggle with your sight picture as best you can. Since I wear glasses I always find it very difficult to get everything lined up and put accurate fire downrange from this position. Nevertheless, the technique stopped the infamous "Hollywood Shootout" of February 1997, and is worth drilling. Robber Emil Matasareanu had taken several hits to his upper body which had all been absorbed by his kevlar armor, and was in the process of hosing down squad cars with an illegally modified AR15, when an enterprising SWAT officer used this firing position from underneath his squad car and cut Matasareanu's legs out from under him. It was game over for the bad guy, and once he went down the acute lead deficiency in his diet was quickly remedied by several helpful officers of the law.
With a table and the "curb" box providing a firing port, Erik tries the "under the car" position with a full-length AR:
I think its just a little easier with a pistol, as you can hold the firearm more properly:
Good fun and good practice, but our time was over far too soon. With the post-November-election panic buying and the attendant skyrocketing of ammo prices, the round count was much lower than it would have been a year ago. With the entire country buying guns and ammo at a rate never before seen in the history of our nation, (60% more volume than this time last year and still not slackening although the election was nearly five months ago!) we would all do well to remember that a firearm is nothing but a liability and a source of false confidence if its owner fails to train to proficiency with it. It will not magically save your life all by itself with no effort on your behalf to master it, anymore than it will leap to life and kill you in your sleep out of some mechanical malevolence. Without proper training, our firearms are no more useful to us than they would be to sheep, who only know to run and inevitably be shorn when they cannot run any longer.
We, the masters of our tools, are the true weapons. It is that mastery which allows us to confront evil men and defeat them, and thereby earn the right to call ourselves good men.
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