Sunday, September 28, 2008

Gunrichment

Yes, that's me with a gun. My mother would not be so happy. I wasn't allowed to have any type of gun as a kid. When I finally got a small Daisy BB gun that used a small pump you had to crank to build the pressure to fire the BB, you would have thought I had a semi-automatic unlicensed weapon. Never mind that I had injured myself riding an ATV and the BB gun was consolation prize. But that's a different story.

This weekend a bunch of guys from church packed up the cars and headed to Elks Neck State park in Maryland to fire some guns at a gun range. I haven't fired anything but a .22 at scout camp, and a shot gun once. I was looking forward to expanding my horizons. I brought along Peter, Tommy, and my roommate's brother, David.

All of the guns were provided by two guys, brothers actually. Now we're not just talking guns. One of them was a 50 caliber missile launcher of a thing. That's Tommy being the first one to man-up and fire the thing. You could feel the shock wave from 20 feet away. From what I heard, the gun has hit the target from up to 2 miles away, and was designed to take out engine blocks. How can you not feel a rush of testosterone after firing this thing?

Fortunately, the wildlife / engine block pulverizer wasn't our only option. I stood on the sideline for a while biding my time for the right moment. I was apprehensive about shooting these high caliber weapons of destruction, but eventually I stepped up to the plate. I'm going to loose some man points for not knowing, but I'm not exactly sure what kind of gun I was going to shoot. The guy loaded it for me, told me how to hold it and stepped back. I released the safety, took aim, and gently squeezed the trigger. Click! Nothing happened. Yep, the bullet jammed. I called the guy over and he took a look at it. I guess it's not a good sign when he says, "Well, I've never seen this before." Since I only pulled the trigger I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault, but I felt bad for ruining this guy's gun. After that I wasn't too keen on taking another chance on either ruining another gun or having some other kind of mishap happen.

For the rest of the day I took on the name of "Jammer." Plus I got a few cool pics of me with a cool gun. Don't let the pics fool you though, I never got to shoot any of the guns. Dab nab it!