After a long
absence I’m restarting my blog, albeit slowly.
So, here goes…
I’m a fan of
guns.
I’ll qualify
that, within a controlled environment, and given that the users of said weapons
know what they’re doing, I’m a fan of guns. I don’t believe in hunting, unless
you’re actually going to eat what you shoot. I also don’t believe in gratuitous violence. I
also believe that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you have no place owning
a firearm.
In short, I enjoy
shooting, or more accurately (pardon the pun), I enjoy target shooting.
So, with those
qualifications in place, here goes…
I’ve been around
guns all of my life. My dad was an officer in the British Army and, at least so
I’ve been told, used to carry a sidearm with him all the time when I was
knee-height to a grasshopper. After that I was surrounded by soldiers and
eventually graduated to shooting empty Coke cans at the bottom of my garden
with an air rife (BB gun). I went on to shoot at school during the time I toyed
with joining the army. There was a time when I was the best shot with an SA-80
in my local age group. These days, I’m a reasonably good clay pigeon (skeet / tiro)
shooter owing to too much time spent in freezing Irish fields in December.
SA 80
Ireland: Cold
So, it was with
great delight that two friends used some form of wasta (influence exerted through personal connections for the
non-Lebanese out there) to get us up to the Lebanese Army Shooting Range
somewhere in the hills above Dora (the route seemed ridiculous and I couldn’t
find my way back) for a morning of target shooting.
Now, and I’ll
apologise in advance, I had assumed that the range wouldn’t be anything to
write home about. However, what I discovered was quite something. Located in
the basement of quite an impressive sporting complex was a modern, well-appointed
range. It was certainly more impressive than the range I occasionally shoot at
back home in Northern Ireland.
It’s
administered by Josons, the best-known Lebanese gun dealers and, as I was about
to discover, the distributors for Beretta in Lebanon.
So, we walk in
and stroll around the waiting room, the walls of which are adorned with all
sorts of pistols. I’m immediately drawn to the Sig Sauer range of handguns. Reputedly
the most accurate and reliable handguns in the world (they used to be used by
the men in black who guard the President of the US), a Sig is something I’ve
always wanted to shoot.
After selecting
my particular flavor of Sig, we set off to the range.
Sig
A trainer from
Josons followed us in and gave us some tips. The pictures below might be some
guide as to whether or not he succeeded:
After we’d shot
around 50 rounds or so with the pistols we were sorely tempted to try out the Beretta
Storm submachine gun.
Beretta Storm
After around 200
rounds giggling like a schoolgirl it was time to hit the road.
A great time, knowledgeable
and enthusiastic staff in a modern setting, I’d recommend it to anyone.
And here's a little proof that I can actually hit a barn door at 50 metres:
