There’s a saying that there’s two types of shooters: Those that haven’t had an ND (negligent discharge) yet and those that have.

Well, I got mine tonight. Nobody and nothing was hurt, just my pride.

Third line of trap tonight, first shot, gun mounted, finger on trigger, called for a bird and as soon as the word “PULL” was out of my mouth I had my ND. The weather was a bit cold, finger was slightly numb, and I had more pressure on it than I thought. The little jiggle I made after calling for the bird was enough to break the trigger.

In general I feel like I’ve had a pretty crappy night. Two of my reloaded shells didn’t ignite on the first two lines. That’s rather embarrassing and I have no idea what I did wrong with them yet. Then I have my ND. I get home and discover that there’s a mouse in the yard that one of our cats nearly killed, but not quite. So, I had to take a shovel to it to end its suffering. I’m not in a very good mood right now.

Sebastian asks the old question, why not roll your own defensive ammo? It’s one of those things Mas Ayoob strongly recommends you do not do.

Here’s where I air my dirty laundry: I’m a dunderhead when it comes to picking carry ammo. It’s just not something that I dwell on. I don’t even rotate it out every 6-12 months. I’ve carried with factory ammo that’s over 4 years old. I buy some, run a few magazines through the gun and if it works, which it always has, I’ll keep it around far longer than any gunny would think proper.

I’ve got some fairly new Hornady ammo in .40S&W around here. I picked that load because it was the only thing the shop had on the shelf that day.

I’ve got some .38SPL Corbon loads in my S&W 442 because as luck would have it I read an article about how awesome Corbon was as a company and that they’re based in Michigan just minutes before running out the door to pick up the gun and some carry ammo for it.

I’ve even got a couple of magazines loaded up with PMC Starfire for a CZ-RAMI even though I know it’s a pretty crappy defensive round that doesn’t expand well because it needs another 100-200fps to make that happen with that bullet design. I’ll still carry it though.

Oh, and I’ve got 3+ year old .45ACP JHP ammo loaded up by a buddy that I carry in my 1911 sometimes. He gave it to me before he shipped off to the Army. I don’t even know what components he used in it, just that he deemed it decent enough for his carry and it works in my gun. Good enough for me.

Now, I’m the kind of guy that likes to read the results of gel tests and such. Odds are I’ve seen published data on every round available on the civilian market. If I wanted to carry the most lethal round available I have no doubt that I could find it. I just don’t care enough to do that. I really don’t.

Hell, most of the time what goes into my carry gun is dictated by what I can find first. The wife tends to get annoyed with me if I try and spend 15 minutes tracking down a box of ammo in the house.

The Kim and Connie Radio show goes online in about a week.

Hat tip to TD for the head’s up.

Man, I love YouTube some days. Went looking for some more speed shooters with shotguns this evening. Here’s another, loading 4 shells over the top into the ejection port. I think the timer shows about 2.5 seconds when he’s done:

That video led me to another with the same guy doing an SSAS stage. I honestly don’t think I could touch that time even if I had modern semi-automatics in my hands and a few hundred hours of practice.

Shot pretty bad tonight. A 19, 15, and a 15 at Wobble.

I did find a bunch of once fired Remington hulls in the trash bins though. That made me happy!

One of the things I learned doing a steel plate shoot with shotguns is that folks, myself included, are generally pretty slow at reloading a shotgun. So, I’ve been looking at techniques that might help me out. The 3 gun guys have some practical solutions, but the CAS shooters aren’t slouches on this topic either. Witness:

Of course, what got me to realize that I was loading my shotgun wrong was a passage in Monster Hunter International. In it author Larry Correia describes a technique used in 3 gun competitions where you palm a number of shells and slap them into the magazine without returning to a shell carrier for each round. This is something that will take me a while to master too. Here’s a video of that technique, albeit in Polish Russian (ed: Doc Russia corrected me in the comments), so I have no idea what the guy is saying aside from “magazine” here and there:

It’ll probably be 9 months before I get a chance to do any more run-and-gun type stuff with a shotgun but I’ll be working on these techniques until then. I’m excited about this!

The Off A Lot shooters are planning on doing some bowling pin shoots this winter. To get prepped a member built a couple tables to regulation size for us to use and they were transported out to a private shooting range on another member’s father’s land and placed behind an existing steel bullet trap.

Super cool! A couple guys tried it out over the weekend and they were pretty happy with the setup. There was a problem though.

Jack: We had to cut the table legs short to get them in the back of the truck. So, they’re not regulation height any more.
Me: *wheels turning for a bit* We could always dig a little hole to shoot from.
Jack: Hadn’t thought of that. Not a bad idea.

In related news I’ve added ThereIFixedIt.com to my RSS reader. I think it may be influencing my thought processes.

I popped over to my local club this morning to try out some shotgun steel plate shoot that was going on. They’ve been trying to do them once a month since July but weather or my own schedule kept me from going until today.

Well, boy howdy if that isn’t some fun!

It’s basically just a 12 shot course like you’d see with pistols but because the range is really worried about safety and such this year the event organizer switched over to shotguns loaded with #8 or smaller shot only.

What a trip. All the targets are just 12 yards out and yes, it is possible to miss a 8″ steel plate at that distance with a shotgun, but not terribly hard to hit them.

I was pretty happy with myself. We took 3 runs down the course and I didn’t screw up the course of fire until the 3rd stage taking my 4th shot. I was a bit thrown off my game that round when I missed the first target completely, barely hit the 2nd, when the RO told me that I was hitting a bit high. Suddenly the coin dropped and I knew why my sight picture was funny: I was running a shotgun with a rifle sight barrel and the front post was GONE. Fell right off on my last shot of the 2nd run. So, while my brain’s trying to figure just where my damned sight was I forgot to move into the proper position for the 4th shot.

Oh well. After the shooting another gent was nice enough to help me find the tiny thing.

I gotta do that again!

Just a little stress or emotion can screw with you.

Well, I’m starting to get a little more consistent with my trap scores being around 20 finally. Three lines tonight, 20, 18, and 20. I had a long post written up about the weird crap that will throw you off your game but I’m canning it so I can concentrate on just one of them.

On my last line, at the last station, I totally failed to properly reload my gun.

As I went to load a shell on the break-action Baikal I saw that the shell didn’t sit flush with the chamber, pushed on it until it did, felt like an idiot because I’d lost my rhythm, called for a bird and was met with a “click” sound. I looked down and the shell was at my feet. My mind was too busy trying to figure out how in the hell I managed to fail to properly reload my gun to concentrate as I made a 2nd attempt at the shot and I missed the damned bird.

Here’s what happened: I had a monumental brain fart when I went to load it and for some reason thought the shell had to fit flush with the barrel. By pushing the shell in further than it should have I gave the springs behind the ejector enough oomph to launch a loaded shell right out of the chamber. When I went to mount I fixed my eyes to the trap house, let go of the shell, it went flying unbeknown to me, I closed the empty action and mounted the gun to my shoulder.

I still have no idea why I did that. I’d already reloaded that gun about 70 times that night alone, at least another 500 times on previous weeks. I know the shell sticks out a bit before you close up the action but my head got the idea that it was wrong and that maybe I’d forgotten to properly resize the hull before loading it or something, I got panicky, and just fell apart.

Why? Emotions. Just a little too much excitement in my brain is what did it. I was on course to shoot a 22, a new high for me. Super duper exciting stuff for me especially considering I’d shot all but one station clean on that line until then.

But, that’s all it took for me to totally fuck up reloading the one gun I’ve reloaded more than any other in the last 6 months and the simplest thing in the world to load on top of that.

Stuff like that makes me really wonder what the frick would ever happen to my gun handling skills if I had to ever use one in defense. That’s going to be 1,000 times more emotionally charged and I honestly do very little training with my defensive guns now that I’m doing all this shotgunning.