BurnsFamily Blog

As recently as a year ago my Dad took me to his Sportsmen’s Club to shoot skeet…what fun! It turns out all the DOOM and Navy Seals games on Playstation training came in handy (I told you it would, Mom! ) — but it’s been a loooong time since I shot a handgun.

Bob invited me to join him at the indoor shooting range tonight. I’ve wanted to do this for *years* but we never really made the time. Bob brought his older gun, a 22 semi-automatic. Kinda squarish and black:

If you look at the targets below you’ll see the “smaller” holes…that’s the .22. Nice, lightweight gun with a manageable amount of kickback. I felt I was pretty accurate with it at 30-40 feet.

Here’s Bob’s new gun, a .357 Magnum:

I know Dirty Harry was referring to the .44 Magnum, but I couldn’t help but hear him say “…the world’s most powerful handgun…” while I was holding on to it. In person … it’s HEAVY. It weighs more than 2-1/2 pounds empty. It doesn’t sound like much until you try to hold a 2-pound weight at arms’ length and keep it level.

Something I didn’t know: a 357 magnum weapon can shoot both .38 and .357 caliber ammunition because they are both the same diameter. We started with .38 caliber ammo. I saw Bob fire off 8 rounds and the kick-back looked impressive. But the anticipation of the kickback made me more anxious squeezing off the first shot myself. My internal dialog was something like this:

Don’t drop it.

Hold on to it tightly. Ohmygosh, this thing is heavy.

Don’t let it kickback and smack you in the forehead.

Don’t look like an idiot. Fire the thing already!

Please let me just hit the target *someplace*.

BANG!!!

We were wearing foam earplugs squished in our ears, with big ear mufflers on our head. I don’t know how many decibels of hearing protection but the 357 explosions made it through quite easily. But you could FEEL the pressure wave it made as much as the sound it made. Geeze!

As I mentioned, Bob’s gun handles both .38 and .357 ammo. The difference between these two is almost 2x the power. The .22 was a SMACK. The .38 was like a loud POP, but the .357 was a BANG!! When Bob started shooting the .357 other people in the range looked over and you could see they were thinking “who’s shooting the BIG gun?”

I didn’t shoot too many of the .357 rounds…it was too fatiguing!

We re-used the targets so pictures #1 and #2 shows the “spill over” from previous attempts. The shot patterns got more …umm….”variable” as we got tired of holding the 357. Here’s a few of the targets we made: