Sunday, April 6, 2008

Shooting Merit badge

Willy is the only webelo and will be almost until his birthday. There is a leader assigned to him but the leader of the 11 year old scouts invited Willy to come with the whole scout troop for the shooting merit badge outting. Willy and Bill camped along the Occoquan river in Warner's back yard. That was a late night... Then we drove to the farm of Brother Padilla's friend near Leesburg. They shot .22 caliber rifles and shotguns to accomplish the merit badge. After this the men who had some guns along brought them out and let the boys and other men take some shots. Willy and i shot this .50 caliber anti-tank gun that brother Padilla brought. It was the grand finale of our outing but this thing has quite a precussion and gives a huge rush. The casing for these bullets are 6 inches long. Willy and I shot most of the same guns which include a .40 cal handgun, a Glock 9mm handgun. Willy shot a 30.06 rifle. He was sitting with his legs in front of him and the kick laid him down. I was very pleased with how brave Willy was. He was eager to do everything and unafraid of any of them. He was only denied shooting the 30.30 rifle because of its hard kick. We both shot an AK47 which I have to say was a real kick in the pants. That was my favorite gun to shoot.

Willy and had a chance to compete against against each other shooting .22 rifles. I had a semiautomatic with 10 in the magazine. Willy had 5 loaded into his single shot .22. I must have aimed badly because even though I shot consistantly I didn't hit the target once but Willy hit the paper 5 times. He did very well at pointing out to all the men that he shamed his father. Here you also see Willy getting ready to shoot a .12 guage shotgun. He hit two pigeons. You might notice that the shotgun he has is a riot gun, owned by brother Parry who is a CIA guy and our NRA certified safety instruction. He had quite a gun collection including another machine gun that neither Willy nor I shot. There was also a .357 Magnum that neither of us shot but it was a pretty big handgun. On our way home Will was telling me about one of the boys being fairly bookish (my words). Willy claimed he thinks now he's a gun guy. We'll see. It was very generous for them to let him come and while Lauril wouldn't have let him go if I didn't, I'm sure glad I went.

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