Don't Mess With Southern Girls

Awesome! Wish I could afford more trigger-time.

 

The younger needs to lean into the shot more...The elder looks like a natural.

 

Good times!

 

Whats that? few in 1 inch grouping? That would get her a marksman badge in the Royal Navy at one time..without the scope of course...But then again Jack Tar never could tell the front end from the back end..

Guns are necessary evil to me. Off to try and get a few foxies over Xmas so I'll be not liked by some..then again if a badger gets in the way, its safer to just shoot than put the brakes on I've been told..especially in the wet.

Broadway hunt in Cotswolds will be getting an extra cheer from me too when they ride out on Boxing day....Tallyho...

 

Much as I love shooting with a scope, I think e.IA.f.t. makes some excellent points. Technology is great, and those batteries that your scope runs on are supposed to last for years....but they can fail. And according to Murphy's Law, they'll fail at the least opportune time. Learning to shoot iron-sights is critical. Once you get comfy with iron sights, then add on the toys. But keep up your iron sight skills.

 

I view them differently, a gun is just a tool, like any other tool. The fictional Gunnery Sergeant Hatrman from "Full Metal Jacket" hit the nail on the head when he said, "Your rifle is only a tool. It is a hard heart that kills."

 

Every kid should learn to shoot a gun. I started mine at the age of five with a .22, rigidly teaching the safety rules and letting them shoot "fun" targets like water balloons and pop cans so they thoroughly understood what a bullet can do. I've taught a lot of people to shoot over the years and the safest gun handlers are always those who learned very young. If you don't start early, it's very difficult to overcome ingrained bad habits learned from toy guns.

My son with his first deer at the age of six, a Kodiak Blacktail:

 

Boy, he sure looks proud with his trophy!

 

Mom butterflied the backstraps and sizzled them in olive oil and garlic that night, then allowed Connor to carry in the tray. He was very proud to provide a delicious dinner to the whole family.

 

As a matter of coincidence it is our Christmas dinner this year. I'll take pictures.

 

By the way, that odd looking rifle he has is a NEF single shot .223. It was a cheap break-open rifle on a shotgun action. I sawed off the barrel and stock to make it kid sized and loaded up some 60 grain Nosler Partitions, which worked just fine on the smallish blacktailed deer we have around here. He took his first three deer with that rifle on August 1st (opening day of deer season) three years in a row.

 

Awesome, Kodiak! Love that you recommend training from an early age. Mrs.Alien's grandparents freak out that our daughter is around guns at home, and have insisted that we "hide them" so she can't get into them. 'Course, taking gun advice from them is like getting computer advice from them as well (they don't even own one, and wouldn't be able to turn one on if they did). My response was "have you ever tried to hide something from a kid? They'll find it." So....she knows that if she wants to see one of our guns, all she has to do is ask. We will drop pretty much anything and let her hold the guns. Supervised. And after checking to make sure they're unloaded and pointed in the right direction. She's dry-fired pretty much everything we have....although she's still a little intimidated by the very solid KLONK of the Mosin. That thing is a beast even unloaded! LOL I will never deny a kid the opportunity to hold one of our guns, provided they ask and listen when I tell them to do something (or not do something). I can't wait until the day our kiddo's old enough to go to the range!

 

I think the best advice I can give is to fill up a dozen water balloons with red dyed water for the first experience shooting. You don't have to be graphic, but if you draw their attention to the mess created by that bullet it really conveys how serious gun safety is. Punching a hole in paper looks like an "ouch" but a pint of red dye splashed in a 24 inch circle will remain in their mind.