Goodale Family Musings: Nice Shootin' Tex!!!

This morning Christopher, Andrew, Mark, Steven and I went shooting. We just went out to some public lands near Gowen Field just outside the Boise city limits (shooting as such not being legal in city limits). This first picture here is our "serious pose" group shot. The posse is rounded up and ready to go!!! :-)

We took Christopher's shotgun, the boys' .22, and a friend's 30-.06 with us. Christopher just got a new slug barrel for his shotgun, so we took it and only slug rounds for that weapon. We shot at phone books strapped together, empty plastic containers, and some cans. We shot most of them from a range of 50 yards, but some we shot close up just for fun. The .22, of course, is fun to shoot because it has almost no kick and the rounds are really cheap, so we probably fired off 300 rounds. We shot 15 slug rounds from the shotgun, and maybe 20 from the 30-.06.

Christopher fired off the first round of the morning, and hilarity(???) ensued. Christopher has fired shotguns many times, but always with a standard target (BB) load, and without a scope. He's also fired M-16s, M-4s, M-240Bs, M-249s, M-203s, and M-2s in the military. And none of those with a scope! He learned with one pull of the trigger this morning that a shotgun with a slug round with a scope is very different than anything he's ever fired before!!! He didn't bother with earplugs (a single shot from a normal shotgun isn't a big noisy deal, right?), nor did he bother with his BCGs ("Basic Combat Glasses," which are hideous looking and nicknamed "Birth Control Goggles"). The recoil sent the scope right between his eyes and Christopher became "that guy" - the apparent newbee with a powerful gun. Man did he get his bell rung!!! Then to cap off the day he fired his final three shotgun slug rounds all loaded in to the gun's magazine at the same time. With the second relatively rapid fired round, he got "scoped" again. He wasn't even sure it hit him, but it tapped his BCGs, breaking open the cut he got earlier in the morning. The BCGs made for a nice little couple of blood rings around his eyes, but as you can tell from his smile, he was no worse for the wear. :-)

We had a great time. Enjoy the photos herein and below, and check out all 46 posted pics from this morning, here on Facebook, or here on Flickr.


Some nice muzzle flash. For all you photo geeks out there (you know who you are), I took this with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi SLR camera, at ISO 400, at 1/640th of a second a f13. The camera shoots about 4fps in burst mode and I just happened to catch this at the right time.