Okay, I’ll do this Throwback Thursday thing.

Okay, I’ll do this Throwback Thursday thing.

Here’s my sister and I at a silhouette shoot around 1986 or so. I’m shooting in the rimfire (.22 caliber) class, and my sister is spotting for me. Looks like I’m at the turkey station.

Most of you have probably never heard of silhouette shooting. Our range was set up for pistol shooting, with two sizes of targets, one for .22 and one for large caliber. The way it works is sets of 10 metal silhouettes of four animals are placed at various ranges. For large caliber pistols this was chickens at 25 yards, pigs at 50, turkeys at 75, and rams at 100. So your score was however many targets you could knock down out of 40. For the .22 targets I’m shooting here, the distances were much less and the targets much smaller.

People usually shot in a variation of the weird position I’m in here. Looks like the shirtless guy on the end must be left handed. There was a separate class for standing shooting. Hitting the rams at 100 yards standing with a pistol is not easy. You always needed a spotter to tell you where your shot landed so you could adjust your aim. I did a lot of spotting for my dad. Sometimes when at the ram station you could actually see the bullet flying to the target through the scope.

So after the round, you’ve got a bunch of targets that are knocked off their pedestals. What happens now? As the shooters move to their next station, a bunch of kids pile into the bed of an old beater pickup and rocket out onto the range. They picked up the targets, spray-painted them to get rid of the bare spot left by the bullet, pile back into the pickup, and rocket back. When I was older, I got to drive that truck.

After D&D, this was my favorite activity when I was a kid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_silhouette_shooting

And yes, I tucked my t-shirt into my jeans and wore a belt.