When I moved to Washington in 2011, the gun laws were almost as permissive here as in Arizona. I didn’t have to worry about getting the guns up here or registering them with anyone, I could just drive them up with the rest of my stuff. Instead I worried about where I would be able to shoot (if at all). The Seattle area is further from public land that’s really safe to shoot on so I started to shoot at indoor ranges. This gets expensive fast, but I had my first real job out of college and no idea how to spend all the money they were paying me. My friend Phil had a pistol and a rifle and we occasionally went to Wade’s gun range in Bellevue. This was another real range with real paper targets, and it went all the way out to 40 yards! Phil and I frequented the range until that 40 yards felt pretty close with our rifles, and we were getting good groups with pistols (slow-fire) out to 20 yards. Wade’s is close to Microsoft campus so I’d occasionally pop over there with co-workers as well.

At some point I got the idea that I wanted to get my Concealed Carry license. This was largely another one of those “Well I’m legally allowed to now, so I will” things, but there were real benefits to having one of these. If you had one you could skip the waiting period for buying guns from dealers, and it was pretty difficult to find a private seller who would sell you a gun if you didn’t have a Concealed Carry license. Washington is a Shall-Issue state for what they call the Concealed Pistol License (CPL) and for about $50 and your fingerprints they’ll issue one of these to anyone who isn’t prohibited from possessing firearms.¹

While waiting for my license to show up in the mail I decided to get a pistol I actually trusted. The 1911 my father bought me was a great gun for the range, but it rarely got through all 7 rounds in a magazine before jamming in some way. Over a lunch break where I had just introduced my co-workers Amelie and Deepak to shooting, I stepped over to the retail side of Wade’s and purchased a concealable .45 pistol. Neither of my co-workers were Americans (yet) and I think they both felt a morbid curiousity in watching me casually buy a weapon over lunch. I think they both would have been truly horrified if Wade’s had let me walk out with the gun, but I didn’t have my CPL yet so I was subject to the standard 10-day Brady waiting period.

Over the next year or so I went to Wade’s range at least once a month to work on my pistol shooting. First I focused on getting my slow-fire groups as small as possible, and then I started working on speeding up my follow-up shots. Eventually I got to the point that engaging a static target while standing still wasn’t a challenge anymore. I joined a few Action Shooting International matches to get practice shooting while moving, reloading, and transitioning between multiple targets. My friend Tyson joined me for a few of these and our shooting improved quite a bit. I consistently scored in the top half of competitors, but to score much higher I’d either need better equipment or a lot more trigger time. For me, ASI was about practicing skills under stress rather than trying to score #1.

Notes

1 The CPL office in the King County Courthouse is the same office where they require sex offenders to register themselves. I have always felt this was an explicit decision on the part of the county.