Weapons training

Last week Greg, Glen and I had the treat of going out to the range and firing off a fairly sizable number of rounds with various guns. I've always loved firing pistols and rifles, but it was a whole new experience to just let loose with hundreds of rounds from some of the automatic weapons we shot.

This is the array of automatic weapons that we fired, along with a standard Glock 9mm pistol (not shown).

The small machine gun pistol with the "fold-over" stock is the HK MP5, which is similar to the Uzi (only more reliable and accurate) and fires a 9mm round.

Here is a picture of Glen modeling with the HK. He doesn't look like he is enjoying himself at all :).
It is amazing how the recoil from the high rate of fire "walks" your shots up as you shoot. You really have to squat forward and put your shoulder into it to keep it on target.

Next we spent some time shooting the M4A1, which is similar to an M-16, that uses a 5.56 mm round. You can see that Glen caught the below photo as an "action shot," with one of the brass cartridges ejecting from the weapon as I fired in full-auto mode.



After that we had the chance to rattle off 200 rounds apeice from the M249 SAW (Squadron Assault Weapon - or light support weapon) machine gun - both from prone as well as from the standing position. Every 10th round was a phosphorescent tracer, so it was a lot of fun to watch the "path of destruction" that this gun can lay down.





We had such a great time - I mean how many times does a guy think, "It would be fun to have (essentially) unlimited ammo to fire off in fully automatic mode." That's the way it was for us and we really enjoyed ourselves. I would have to say that this has been one of the highlights of the deployment so far!


Next week I'm going to get to fire a sniper rifle - so I'll plan on posting some pictures of that as well.