Heirloom shooting

So, today was a bit of an interesting day for me.

Quite some time ago, my father had inherited an airsoft gun, which had been left to him by his grandfather (that being, my great-grandfather). It had been in our possession for a while, mostly because we couldn’t (legally) do anything. Dutch law states that you can’t use firearms in public areas, but our backyard is, unfortunately, quite a bit too small to actually fire a rifle it at any range.

So, back in July, my father took my brother out (I was, unfortunately, otherwise occupied) to illegally go into the forest and shoot the gun at a couple of empty cans. The full story about that can be read (in Dutch) HERE.

Fast-forward a month or so, and my father admits to me that he was getting rather itchy to go and try the gun out again. We still had ammo for it, so there was no reason not to go out and perform more delicious can homicide. Needless to say, after hearing stories from both my father and my brother, and hearing how enthusiastic they were about the whole experience, I was quite interested in going out shooting, too.

So, today, we went back to the spot that my father and brother had spent a good hour of shooting and set up some cans for me there. The first thing I noticed as I held the rifle was that the thing was a lot heavier than I had thought, but I had also forgotten about the heavy wooden stock that probably added a lot to that weight.

After painstakingly learning how to load it (I already shot an air rifle, dad, I know how these things work), and having set up a can, all I could really do was start aiming…

It was nothing like the videogames, that’s one thing. It took me a few moments to get the hang of the sights, which were a lot less intuitive than I had imagined it to be. More on good faith and the whole belief that ‘not shooting is never a hit’, I pulled the trigger…

 

BAM, was about all I could think. After this great success, we decided to take a couple of steps back and shoot again. This all was pretty successful, but the fork in the tree soon didn’t fit anymore. There were unfortunate plants in the way that prevented us from walking back, so we placed a plank that we had taken with us on the ground and started placing the cans on there…

 

 

I’m absolutely no marksman, but especially that last shot made me feel pretty damn awesome. After that, we just started taking potshots from different angles, places and distances, until my brother arrived from his work to also join us for a bit. It was great fun, but we quickly started to notice our aim was declining. We were obviously growing tired, so after an hour or so, we packed up and headed back home.

The cans were utterly destroyed, so I didn’t even regret it.