Small Surprises

I read a posting on a site about somebody stopping and creating a line of traffic as the lead driver got out of his car to go help a turtle get across the road. Nobody was honking or screaming, the writer said, they just watched and waited.


See that with ducks now and then. Mama crossing the road with babies, people wait.


Reminded me of something I saw a few years back. I had a shooting buddy who was big into submachine guns. He owned six or eight of them, including a couple in .22 Long Rifle, go figure. He invited me to go on the annual machinegun shoot, at a gun club in Albany, Oregon.


This was an event that drew all the heavy-hardware guys. Dozens of shooters, with everything from fully-automatic Glocks to .50 Brownings mounted on jeeps.


The range had been set up with a bunch of reactive targets–balloons, oil drums, posts to be cut in half, like that. There were various courses of fire–military guys shooting M-16s on one end; small calibers on the line; suppressed weapons, etc. 


There were dealers who brought their arsenals, and you could rent a piece and put a few rounds through it. I got to examine and shoot some weapons I'd never seen up close before, including a .50 Barrett sniper rifle. The sucker does kick some. The blowback from the muzzle is fierce.


At one point, with the line hot and twenty-some people spewing jacketed hail downrange from all manner of full-auto weapons, two whitetail does walked onto the range a couple hundred yards out.


"Cease fire, cease fire!" the Range Officer yelled. He didn't need to–the line went cold on its own, and once weapons were downed, the RO walked out toward the deer, took off his hat, and waved it, shooing them off.


Once they were gone, he came back. Not kosher to shoot the critter in such circumstances, and besides, nobody was allowed to hunt here. The deer were used to the noise and it didn't bother them.


Apparently the safest place for a deer to be during hunting season is a shooting range. 


I can't help but wonder what a rabid anti-gunner would have thought had he seen that. All those rednecks with muh-muh-machineguns stopping cold so somebody could shoo a deer off without hurting it? Probably wouldn't have believed it.