Postby Boots » Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:56 am
Joe just now coming back to you on this. Your 500 gram trigger is what we Texans would call a hair trigger. My standard pistol trigger was a kilo as per the rules (and not a whisker more as a good smith had further polished the action) and it was itself pretty “twitchy”. I think the free pistol might have even approached 250 grams, it was so light you could have breathed on it and punched off a round.
All of the ready tables in our range had .22 holes punched in them from torqued up marksmen getting a tension twitch in their gun finger and punching a round through the table into the floor. More than once I had some yahoo on the point next to me yank off a round into the table before the targets turned and splatter my crisp, knife edge cadet pants with a spatter of fragments. That sort of thing will tend to get one’s attention.
One time we hosted a match attended by, among others, a little university from a nearby town who brought all their one day a week ROTC guys up. What a rodeo. They had a bunch of 30 year old Hi Standards that either hadn’t been cleaned in their life, or must have been oiled with axle grease. These things looked like they had been carried by desperate Cossacks during the blizzards of the 1917 Revolution, as backups to their Webley’s and 44 Russians.
One guy got the yips after their first round and his old loose pistol went full auto for four or five rounds and peppered his neighbor’s target. This stimulated a very animated reply from his neighbor and he decided it might be best to retire from action lest his neighbor force him into a duel on the spot. Another guy, his barrel was so shot out, when he reeled in his target it was filled with wide oval holes. Near as we could tell his billets were tumbling into the target. One other of his mates decided to use the “pistol up” ready position practiced by movie marksmen and let go a round into the acoustic ceiling halfway down range, taking out a flourescent tube light in a rather spectacular way. Yet another guy’s weapon jammed up the fourth or fifth time, and he whirled around to get help to clear the jam... while pointing the jammed weapon directly at the belly of the range officer, a crusty old gunny sergeant who on normal occasions moved at the speed of a sea slug. Faced with the possibility of being perforated on his own range, he suddenly developed the start speed of Usain Bolt and leaped about 10 feet in one jump behind his surplus steel gunny desk for cover. The rest of us scattered like chickens. I learned that day every man is brave until he looks down the barrel of a loaded weapon.
After the old gunny regained his composure, their entire team was summarily dismissed from the range, their retreat having been made all the more ignoble by the gunny making them stand outside while he personally (and very carefully) unloaded all their weapons, and having delicately and carefully tossed them into a large paper sack sitting on the concrete (clank clank clank) conveyed same to their team captain with the fatherly admonision, “Son, the road outta town is THAT way.”
Last edited by
Boots on Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
BE WELL, BUT NOT DONE
Hank: "Do you know how to jumpstart a man's heart with a downed power line?"
Bobby: "No."
Hank: "Well, there's really no wrong way to do it."