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Please post political post in the new Politics forum.
Okay, Kirk came up with the first great idea on fighting the "winter blues" - going out and shooting your favorite gun (hopefully a lever) at a target 100 yards away then posting the pics and a range report.
Mod71alaska came up with the next great idea - posting pics of your hardware - again, hopefully a lot of levers.
Here's my suggestion. Take a newbie to the range with you sometime in the next 2 months. Introduce someone to shooting - hopefully lever-shooting, but any shooting will do. Be it a friend, neighbor, co-worker, customer - whatever, make a point to take someone who doesn't shoot and teach them about our passion.
This will serve a couple purposes. It helps defeat the winter blues. It gets you out to the range. And in this political year, we need to show as many "non-gun enthusiasts" that guns are not evil - and shooting can be plain fun!
Thanks for the suggestion - I may have a candidate.
In the past, I usually started out with a little .22 - usually a bolt-action 77/22, off a bench in a rifle rest (can't miss) shooting at metal flip-up targets (fun, non-intimidating) then gradually progressed to more 'convenient' .22's (the semiautomatic 10/22), and when they get tired of reloading the same 10-round magazine, hand them a 50-round magazine already loaded, and they learn how those nasty hi-cap magazines are really ok.
Then work up to some bigger and better stuff at a pace they are comfortable with, and pretty soon, they are having a blast with REAL guns! They learn all sorts of notions they had were wrong, and will be more skeptical of anti-gun media in the future.
DON'T have them shoot without good ear and eye protection, and DON'T give them some loud, kicking, semiautomatic thing to shoot right off - you just scare them.
It's 2025 - "Cutesy Time is OVER....!" [Dan Bongino]
Excellent points! I have also always tried to start people off with a .22LR. Darn accurate, low noise, low recoil and just a ton of fun to shoot! The point is not necessarily to convert the "anti-gunner", but rather, to show the "fence-sitter" - the person with no care one way or the other - just how enjoyable shooting can be. Hard to do if you start them with something that will really thump them hard!
I took a friend of ours from church. She's a super-lib, and believed that guns were evil.
An afternoon at the range seems to have changed that - she says she now gets the whole notion of self defense with a gun, and that a gun is indeed a tool. She gets the whole "fight fire with fire" idea. Once they get hands-on, people intimidated by firearms can better understand what they are, and forget the notion of a gun flying around and going off by itself.
It was worth an afternoon of instruction on my part. Now maybe she'll have a positive impact on her lib friends.
