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Sept. 26, 2005 It was fascinating to get in rental cars in a faraway place and travel on streets to some industrial corridor to visit gun ranges. The law at that time and for that district (Pomano Beach) if indeed district is the correct word, was that a gun and the amunition had to be separated while travelling. So one of the two had to be in the car and the other in the trunk. Around that time there was talk of trying to pass a law that would let any regular citizen carry a gun as long as it was visible, as in on a holster on a belt and not concealed. It was interesting to be around people who were interested in guns. Parking at the ranges we were far away from the beaches and the pools or the easy afternoons of walking to piers or floating on rafts. The persons behind the counter were all business and you had to sign some papers and show some form of identification but beyond that, there was no large problem to the whole process. I learned that there is a big difference between the ease with which characters on film shoot guns and the real shooting. The two biggest were the kickback of the weapon and the sound. The guns had to be held with two hands and even then they kicked back tremendously. I suppose different calibre and smaller guns had less of a kick though. As for the sounds, just opening up the ear protectors a little bit was too noisey. We used regular targets and I did pretty well. At that time there were alot of targets one could choose from and some that were displayed had some picture of a leader of a nation that America was at odds with or was at odds with America or both. I can't remember who it was but the circles were drawn around the figure of the face so that the bullseye was at the forehead. There was a powerful feeling when all was said and done and one was actually pulling the trigger. The echo, the steel, the reeling in of the target afterwards on a contraption not much different than a clothesline, closer, closer, looking at how well one did. It was odd though, to look at the sides of the walls of the range and see that they had been littered with hundreds of bulletholes. How was it that someone could shoot agaisnt the wall and why did they do that? One time I looked at the ground and saw a .22 calibre bullet that had a regular silver casing but with a strange top end. It had a blueish coloring. I picked it up. The top part of the bullet, that 1/3 of the bullet or so, was a see through plastic-like material. Inside were what looked like hundreds of small round beeds. I thought that it was odd how something so dangerous could look so artistic,- the shape and silver and blue and bead agaisnt beed, and all this held up under the electric lights but w/ some gunsmoke in the air between the viewer and the object. I learned that it was something called a snakeshot. It was to shoot at a snake's head and the beads would insure that the target was gotten. How it got there I didn't know. I held onto it as a keepsake but its gone now, just like those days of shooting at the Florida gun ranges. ------------ About the author: Brian Michael Barbeito lives in Aurora, Ontario, Canada. His two most recent books are Medium Double Double Milk (non-fiction) and Fluoride And The Electric Light Queen (poems), neither currently published. Email: Brian1750@Hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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