When I turned 18 I decided to buy my own rifle. I don’t think I had any clear reasoning behind why, and I certainly had no idea what I wanted to do with a rifle. This was probably one of those “Well I’m legally allowed to now, so I will” things. I went into Second Amendment Sports to take a look at their selection. This was in 2007 or 2008, and options in my price range were limited. ¹ There were lots of cheap hunting rifles, but none of them had any sights to speak of and I didn’t have the budget for a rifle and a scope. The most affordable rifle was a DPMS A-15, an AR-15 pattern rifle made by a company that mass-produced M16s for the U.S. Military. I bought it because it looked cool and the logo had a panther on it.

Over the next few years my brother and I took a monthly shooting trip out to Redington Pass. This used to be one of the most popular places to go shooting around Tucson, so we always made sure to get out there as early as possible. We never brought “targets” in the normal sense - mostly we were shooting at soda cans (since I was too young to buy target-grade beer) but sometimes we’d bring fruit or other compostable targets. Our ‘targets’ ranged in size from a Watermelon to a 4” Clay Pigeon and our engagement distances ranged from 15 to 200 ft. This was ‘hits count’ shooting mostly from the standing or kneeling position.

On these trips we always brought the same guns: the Winchester 67A, the Ruger 10/22, and the Ruger Mk. III. We rarely shot the AR-15 and in retrospect that’s because we didn’t have a way to reliably diagnose where the rounds were going in relation to where we were aiming. We’d tell each other whether we thought the hits were high, low, left, or right, but it seemed like we just weren’t able to ever hit anything. I had no idea you had to actually adjust iron sights on new guns, and the one sighting target that came with the rifle seemed comically small - how was I supposed to hit this piece of paper at 25 yards? I couldn’t even figure out how far away 25 yards was, so that rifle mostly stayed at home.

There was definitely an element of competition in these shooting trips. My brother and I challenged each other to hit smaller targets further away with the rifles, or to quickly hit multiple targets with the pistol. Eddy was a much better pistol shooter than I was but I was usually able to hit the distant rifle targets in fewer shots than he was. These are some of my favorite memories with Eddy. Our drives out to Redington and back were filled with jokes, music, and generally getting to know each other. Eddy and I are far enough apart in age that it was tough to form a good fraternal connection over any of our other hobbies. Shooting put us on relatively equal footing despite our physical differences.

Shooting on public land isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. At one point Eddy and I were walking past our ad-hoc firing line to check targets when a man in a Honda pulled up, walked out towards the range with a shotgun in hand, fired off 4 shots, and then got back in his car and drove away. He didn’t point the gun anywhere near Eddy or me but we were decidedly down range from his shots. We think he was trying to impress the girls he drove out with.

On another trip I took with some friends from the U of A, the police pulled up and demanded that everyone immediately drop our weapons. This is when I learned that despite owning my Winchester rifle for several years I had no idea how to make that rifle safe once it was loaded. I carefully set it down, pointed downrange with a round in the chamber and the bolt cocked, but with no safety engaged. It turns out the police only wanted to make sure we picked up our trash and I guess they figured yelling at everyone was the best way to ensure no one had a loaded weapon pointed at them.

At one point Dad and I tried going out to an established range in Oracle. We sat and shot my AR-15 for a while on their 100-yard range, from a bench, at an honest-to-god paper target. My father may remember this differently than I do, but after we both had taken shots at the target it might as well have been the pattern from a shotgun. There were no discernable groups and most of our shots were in a 20 inch circle on the right side of the target. From a ‘hits count’ perspective this was acceptable shooting, but this is probably the first time I shot a paper target and got real feedback about where my shots were landing. This is also the trip we shot my first pistol, a Colt 1911 that my dad bought me for my 21st birthday.

Notes

1 The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) had expired in 2004 and the selection of semi-automatic rifles was still pretty sparse compared to today - this DPMS may have been one of the better rifles they carried but this manufacturer is now widely considered to be very low quality. DPMS no longer makes firearms.