Today we had another MLI outing. Last quarter we went to Oakland and watched the A's beat the Mariners. This quarter we had lunch together and then went out to a firing range.
First, we got together for lunch at the Round Table Pizza in Marina to start things off. They have a pizza buffet and salad bar there. Our Chief MLI called ahead and told them that we'd have a large turnout, but that kind of warning went unheeded and we had to wait 20 minutes before the first pizza came out to the buffet. And then they only brought out three. It took another 20 minutes to bring more out. Terrible.
At lunch we presented a going away gift for one of the military staff from the school. He is heading to NYC to work as a recruiter. We gave him a picture of all the military staff taken in front of the school. It was framed with all of us writing something to him on the border around the photo.
Then, a bunch of us headed up to Watsonville to an indoor firing range. One of the MLI's gave a short class on pistols and then we headed onto the range. I partnered up with an Air Force MLI and we decided to each rent a gun and then share. He got a Glock 9mm and I got a .357 Magnum. We also got 50 rounds of ammo for each and a couple targets. We got a couple of the plain silhouettes, a couple bad guy with a gun targets, and a couple bad guy with a gun and a human shield targets.
We started off with the Glock. I've fired the Army issue Beretta 9mm, so I gave him a couple of tips and then we got started. We fired 5 rounds at a time and we'd reel the target back in to check how we did after each set of shots. It took a little time for my partner to get used to the Glock, but by the time we were done, he was handling it quite well.
When we ran out of 9mm ammo, we moved onto the .357. We both fired the revolver much better than the Glock. The kick was nearly non-existant with this gun. While we were shooting this gun, we also got a chance to shoot a big-ass .44 revolver (I'm fairly ignorant of gun names but this was a big-ass gun). Now that thing had a kick! I was able to shoot it pretty well, though.
When we were nearly out of .357 ammo, my partner went back to get more 9mm ammo. We spent the rest of the time firing the Glock some more. The second time around we put the targets a lot farther out. We started at 15m and then moved to 20m.
Overall, we had a great time. Between firing weapons, we spent a lot of time checking out how others were doing and comparing targets. Some of the MLIs brought family members, too, so there were a bunch of us on the 7 lanes we had reserved. The MLI that gave the class is a regular at the range, so he got it worked out for us to have a section of the range to ourselves. Everyone got to fire a variety of weapons.