home on the range...

The shooting range, that is! Yes, World Wide Web, I am an official sharpshooting badass. Evidence!

Taking care of business.

So I may not have been wearing any blaze orange or camouflage (where does one get that stuff in DC, anyway?), but I had all the necessary elements, including:

• Shooting-approved shades;
• Sh*t-kicking boots;
• Gun-approved bum gloves;
  
• A not-to-be-f*cked-with serious expression; and, last but not least,
  
• A 20-gauge semi-automatic shotgun. Yay!
  

Seriously, have I ever looked more street illegal in my life? No. No, I haven't. But, despite my awesomely delinquent appearance, the above-pictured shiny wood-and-metal accessory (a Beretta AL391 Urika, to be exact) is not only 100 percent street legal in Virginia, but I'm pretty sure it's practically requisite for residents to own. God bless Virginia and its love of freedom and using that freedom to shoot skeet.


And you know what? I love freedom too.

Sharp shooting. Nice ass!

And so does The Law!

Locked and loaded. Nice ass!

We may look like super tough (in The Outsiders sense) experts, but, um, what you're seeing here is The Law and I shooting live firearms for the first time...ever. As such newcomers to what is unquestionably the best activity of all time, you'd think we'd have sucked our first time around. And, well, you'd be right. However, by the time we got the chance to shoot a second round -- roughly three minutes later -- we had become bonafide sharpshooters. No joke. We were sniping out clay disks left, right, over, under, high, low, near and far. It was on.

Was this natural talent? Duh. Of course -- at least in part. But before you start to worship us for the sharpshooting deities we clearly are, I'm going to tell you something: Shooting is not hard, like, for anyone. If you're not blind and have arms, you're pretty much set. See, there's not a lot of skill involved, in the classical sense. You don't have to worry about aiming, using a scope or judging wind speeds really. The only thing I found to worry about was how my ass looked from behind.

Nice ass! David, our shooting instructor, is working those khakis out! (By the way, that sea of blaze orange you see in the field out there is a hot mess of broken clay targets. There is A LOT of shooting going on out in Centreville, Va., a.k.a. the tightest place on Earth.)

In fact, the only real skill you need to become a good shooter is the ability to chillax and just go with it, at least according to our shooting guru David: "It's like taking a swing -- sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't." That's called wisdom, my friends.

Of course instead of a golf club or baseball bat, you're "swinging" a semi-automatic or 12-gauge double barrel. But, then again, in Virginia golf clubs and firearms are pretty much the same.

The Law took to David's wisdom like it was her job and was sniping out clay like a pro. I -- although still an excellent shooter, mind you -- was a little more hit-and-miss (literally) with the targets. I either need a bit more practice or I need to start toting in a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle and just start spraying those damn clay disks out. Of course, for some reason I don't think Virginia's fine police force -- freedom loving they may be -- would appreciate my efforts to truly master this sport. But, I guess with the complimentary gun rental tickets The Law and I received upon successfully completing our Learn to Shoot course, I'll just take whatever Weapon of Clay Destruction I can get when I go back. And trust that I will go back because the Bull Run Shooting Center just might be the best thing to ever happen to the DC area.

But enough reading and typing! My burgeoning love for the glory of skeet shooting deserves a whole new medium -- video montage!* (And you're going to want to crank the volume up to 11 because the soundtrack is tight.)



*By the way, I am so ridiculously attached to this blog that I spent about five hours mastering this two-minute video montage...and by "mastering," of course, I mean barely piecing it together. Included in this many hours of unpaid work were several technical inability issues, mainly stemming from my need to rotate the video. See, The Law and I shot the low quality footage with my Nikon S1 digital camera and instead of holding the camera upright, we held it sideways like a couple of assholes. At the time, it seemed to produce a better shot (of course that pun was intended!)...or so we thought. Turns out, when I went to rotate the video 90 degrees, my computer wouldn't allow me (or more like, I couldn't figure out how) to reconfigure the dimensions. So, everything looks a little short and squat in the live video shots. I should probably just go ahead and shoot my my computer in the face, er, motherboard. Whatever.

Oh, and also, I realize my hair looks super gnarly. That's partly because I got up just 20 minutes before I had to meet The Law at the metro to head out to National Airport to pick up our cobalt blue rental Dodge Avenger, and partly because DC salons butchered it for me (thanks). But don't worry (um, because I'm sure my hair situation has caused many to fret...), I'm getting it cut this Friday. In Boston. Problem solved. Ciao, e-friends!