Militia Training 2007

Last Friday I went out with a bunch of guys that like guns- The way Cindy Sheehan loves attention. Seriously.

We went out into the Arizona desert and found a big hill to shoot against. There were silencers, large caliber scoped rifles with the bi-pod mount in front so you can shoot without your arm getting tired. One of the guns even had a bayonet! The main guy even had this crazy explosive called tannerite. According to him, it was developed as a training aid for snipers. Apparently it can be difficult to tell if you hit your target when the target is thousands of feet away. With the tannerite, when they hit the target, it would go BOOM! It's supposedly quite stable and will not explode if a pistol round hits it, only high-powered rifle rounds. It was really fun! To the side you can see how it launched a big blue barrel. The picture shows the barrel at about half-way up! I felt a little bit under-armed with my 9mm pistol and my two 22 caliber rifles.

I learned a couple of things while shootin' with the men. 1) we should have just invaded Russia during the cold war and 2) we should just invade China right now! Why do I say these controversial things? 1) The gun guy bought a bunch of Russian ammo over the Internet and only about half of it worked. If we would have invaded Russia, their soldiers would have been too busy trying to find a shell that would fire to really fight back. It's really disconcerting to pull the trigger and only hear a click. 2) He had a Chinese assault rifle. It weighed about 80 pounds and was impossible to hit anything. Our soldiers could just walk up to the Chinese lines and demand surrender while the Chinese soldiers tried vainly to aim that lead brick to shoot back.

So Memorial Day I took the little boys out to the same spot for a little target practice. I know, I know, we're extremely careful. My boys have been drilled since birth about the basic safety rules of guns. (Treat every gun as if it's loaded, never point a gun at someone, if one of your friends wants to show you his dad's gun, come home immediately!) I firmly believe that if you refuse to allow your boys to learn to use guns responsibly and to respect them, you're living dangerously. Boys are interested in guns and it's a lot safer to allow them to investigate them under close adult supervision than sneaking around with their friends.

Anyway, we had a great time. The boys needed my help supporting the weight of the rifles, but they were able to hit a few cans and boxes. We took turns, so that only one person was shooting at a time and the others stayed safely behind the shooting line.




Here's a flowering cactus that we saw on the drive. I liked the contrast of the delicate beauty of the bloom against the drab cruelty of the cactus and surroundings.