Walther P22...The Wait is over.

For a long time i have been trying to pull the trigger on buying a neat little gun for recreational shooting. I have spent many hours looking on the net and reading reviews. Many times i just came back to the one that looked cool. I guess my gun passion has been sparked even more the last few weeks since I will now be able to carry my gun basically where ever i want. Sunday we loaded up and headed to Opry mills in Nashville for a long and grueling day of Christmas shopping. We walked around the mall like 17 times and finally made our last stop in Bass Pro Shop. I had actually been there earlier in the day and drooled over most of the guns. I was looking for a little bit larger caliber gun that would be a potential carry size gun to leave in my car if i ever needed or if I was actually walking down a shady street one that wouldn't pull my pants down its so heavy. I initially started looking at a few springfield armory ,taurus , and Smith/Wesson pistols. As i was looking a voice from the heavens came saying "go with the springfield" (well actually just a nice guy from KY but he sure did know guns) Then my friend "Corky" came along who was the head dude at Bass pro shop. Corky was a rather large man but had a gun sized heart of gold. He began talking with me about different calibers and differnt guns that he liked. I asked him just for fun to let me hold the Walther P22 .22LR caliber pistol. Needless to say it was love at first sight and touch. The one i had read so much about was finally coming home with me. I decided to go with the .22LR for now since it was more economical to shoot and it is small enough that Tara can shoot comfortably. Maybe down the road I will jump to the next level but fun of shooting ranked at the end of the day. The process was really easy and after a 15 min background check I was on my way home with my new gun. Flash forward to today and I actually got to shoot the gun. The anticipations were high and in the end i was not disappointed. Initially I was a little concerned because one particualar brand of shells we had it did not seem to like them but the other two brands it shot with out a flaw. Its so light and easy to shoot. We shot thru about 200 rounds of ammo in about 20 minutes. I have attached a video just for fun of the new gun in action. Get your stop watches out.... I have clocked it at about 10 shots in 1.8-2.0 seconds. Pretty darn fun. The video is not great since its on a cell phone but you will get the idea.

Load 6...Fire!!

Well tonight was the culmination of alot of years waiting and conversations talking about a hand gun carry permit. It is something that Me, Ryan and Timbo had talked about doing for quite sometime but just never got the time or nerve to go do it. Our good friend "dead eye" Jones has had one for a few years and he was the envy of our group being able to feel the warm touch of the gun barrel whenever he desired. Last night Me,Ryan,Tara and the Teter Man loaded up and headed for 'Bend of The River' gun club in Cookeville to begin our 2-night journey. We all road back into the woods of cookeville to the club with a little bit of anxiety because of the unknown factor that laid ahead. Needless to say it was an adventure last night as we listened to the modern day Wyatt Earp tell us who we could and could not shoot. Just to give you a visual on our instructor....picture your favorite crazy uncle Buck in a black leather vest with khaki pants ,work boots and a holstered gun on his right hip. At one point he proceeded to pull about 6-7 guns out of every possible crevice and from every extremity he had. It was quite impressive to say the least. As usual me and ryan had the maturity of 12 year old girls and giggled thru most of the instructional video as it depicted potential "self defense" situation. The night was topped off by somewhat of a tricky 30 question quiz and then we were off to think about the Friday night shooting festival. Tonight, Me,tara, and Ryan loaded up again to go take our shooting test to conclude our class. As we walked up to the lodge the sound of multiple guns firing would make you think of a Vietnam setting. All you could hear in the cold,crisp air was gun fire. We were greeted in the Lodge by a lady I will just call Bertha because i'm unsure of her name... bertha says" you here to shoot and you know where the gun range is?" Somewhat of a smirk came across our faces because any breathing human could find the range seeing how the raging gunfire was only about 50 yards away. Just in case you werent in Middle Tn tonight the temperature was about 22-24 F as we approached the shooting range. We were all still a little nervous as we walked into the outside range and our Wyatt Earp "Sarge" was barking orders at some of our fellow students in the class. As our extremities became numb the nervousness continued to rise. As the first 5 people finished up our hope was to go as a threesome and shoot in the same group. We decided our 6 shooters were not going to be the best gun for this fast paced shoot off. So we opted for the quicker load semi-automatic. I ended up using Tara's borrowed gun and went the group before tara and ryan. If you have never shot when its 22 degrees then you are missing something special. Hands feeling numb makes it hard to load the clip... and the instructor barking "load 6 and fire on the Whistle" It was a little faster paced than i thought it might be. Needless to say when the smoke settled it was more than enough to make the passing grade. After my group was done there was only three shooters left. Ryan,TAra and a 80 year old Northerner. I was quite proud of my little shooting girl. She did really good- I think she ended up with 49/50 and 50/50 in the black. All that keeps us from the coveted piece of paper is $115 bucks and a trip to the DOT for registration and fingerprinting. So overall it was a good and easy process, Hopefully our good friend Mr. Obama will not abolish our little permit and take our guns away from us.