Yeah, I told you I was hooked on this new hobby, didn’t I? A couple of weeks ago I picked up my new shotgun, a 12 gauge Beretta 3901 Target RL. The best thing about purchasing a firearm in Virginia is that you can take it home that very day, unlike in California, where I had to wait 10 days to pick up my old Soviet rifles. WTF, Golden State?

I’ve taken it out a couple of times over the past few weeks and it has performed admirably. And by that, I mean my scores have improved significantly. Of course, that is also due to the additional lesson I took last month so now have a much better idea of what, exactly, I am supposed to be doing.

Below are a few photos from this past weekend when Wayne, Olga, and I headed out to the Bull Run Shooting Center on a beautiful fall day.

Yeeeah, I don’t mean to brag, but I beat all these dudes. OK, I guess that is bragging.

PULLLLL!!

Broke it.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camo hat at home

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I love this commercial.

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After doing so poorly at skeet shooting in Illinois, I decided I needed some proper instruction in the finer parts of shooting a moving target with a giant gun, so back in June some friends and I took the “Learn to shoot” class at the Bull Run Shooting Center in Centreville, VA (does that qualify as real Virginia?). If you live in the DC area and have any desire to learn how to trap shoot, I highly recommend the class. Here are a few photos from that shooting session. I went back a few weeks later to shoot a few rounds with Wayne and Olga and even bought a fancy Browning shooting vest (I desperately needed the recoil pad insert, and the giant pockets to hold the shells). I gotta say I am pretty hooked on this new hobby. Now I just have to purchase my own shotgun. I guess that’s an important thing to own, or whatev.

Me

Laura

Liz

Nick

Olga

Wayne

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I flew back to Southern Illinois over Memorial Day to visit my relatives and celebrate my cousin Katie’s graduation from high school. On Saturday morning some of us went skeet shooting at the World Shooting & Recreational Complex in Sparta.

The complex is so big that my uncle has a “gun cart” to get around it. As you can see, it holds shotguns instead of golf bags.

Katie and I

And with my brother, uncle, and dad.

That was the first time I’ve been skeet shooting and it was really fun, despite the fact that I only managed to hit one clay pigeon. I’ve found a place out here in Northern Virginia that has shotgun sports, so I think I’ll take a lesson there in June. Maybe then I can hit two clay pigeons.

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This past Sunday I went shooting with my cousin Jason and his friend Danielle. I purchased a Mosin Nagant M91/30 back in July 2004 but never got a chance to test it out because I moved to London shortly thereafter.

We headed out to the canyons past Thousand Palms – public land where you are allowed to target shoot. There wasn’t much in the way of targets, but someone did spray paint a giant blue man on a piece of plywood and place it on the side of the mountain, so it was kinda like shooting at a giant smurf.

My Mosin. It’s a big, heavy gun. Built in the Soviet Union in 1942 during the midst of Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna, the Great Patriotic War. A beautiful piece of history, it might have been used by some starving Ivan in the defense of Stalingrad or the capture of Berlin. We’ll never really know.

Taking aim at the giant smurf

I’m gettin’ back to the Fincher family’s Texas roots. I thought that perhaps my aim would improve by wearing Jason’s cowboy hat, but it doesn’t quite work like that. “Lindsay, LEAN into the rifle.” I know, I know. Need more practice.

The Mosin was just as I expected – LOUD (yes, I had ear protection), with a nice kick, but damn that bolt can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. I really had to smack the bolt pretty hard to eject the spent shell casing.

After I went through my box of Winchester 7.62×54r ammo, I tried out the guns that Jason brought along: two shotguns and a Glock handgun.

The shotguns were fun to shoot

First time I ever shot a handgun (bad stance duly noted). I can definitely see why the Glock is such a popular handgun, but I doubt I’ll be buying one in the future. I’ll stick to my $75 Russian military surplus rifles, and maybe a Mauser Kar98k while I’m at it.

I also purchased a Mosin M44 back in November 2005, but haven’t had a chance to disassemble it and clean off all the cosmoline gumming up the parts because I left the gun at my parent’s house in California when I moved to DC.

The M44 with permanently attached bayonet

I had a lot of fun shooting that day, and I’m definitely hooked on the Mosins. I’ve got to find myself a few Mosins and shooting range out here on the east coast. DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, though, so I’m not quite sure how I would go about purchasing firearms in Maryland or Virginia (certainly there aren’t any gun stores within DC city limits) when I’m a DC resident. I’m pretty sure I can do that, but prior to do that I have to go down to DC police headquarters and apply for some pain in the ass registration certificate for every firearm I buy. Whatev, maybe I’ll just wait until I move somewhere else.

(Post title is from “Glorified G” by Pearl Jam, of course)

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The 10 day waiting period is over, and I have picked up my Mosin Nagant! Here it is:

In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of this rifle is the information located on the receiver, which is pictured below:

A quick glance at the receiver tells me that this rifle was produced in 1942, a year that is well known in WWII history due to the bloody fighting that occurred at Stalingrad. The lack of a smooth finish on the receiver also indicates that the arsenal was using various production shortcuts in order to get the rifles to the soldiers at the front as quickly as possible. At the bottom of the receiver is an imprint of an arrow inside a triangle. This indicates that the rifle was produced at the Izhevsk arsenal, which is situated in the foothills of the Ural mountains. The serial number of this rifle is “K3 4577.” The “3″ is actually the Cyrillic character that is equivalent to the “Z” in the Latin alphabet, so the serial number can be translated as “KZ 4577.” At the top of the receiver is the Soviet hammer and sickle enclosed in a wreath. There are a few more marks on this rifle, but I’m not sure what they mean so I will have to research them further.

This rifle is truly a beautiful piece of history, and will look even better once I clean all the Soviet grease off of it. Now, if only this weapon could talk! Did it see action at Stalingrad, Kursk, or Kiev? Perhaps its previous owner participated in the capture of Berlin? Unfortunately, we’ll never know. In the future, I would like to purchase a few more Mosins…I really want one that was produced before the Revolution, and an M44 would be nice, too.

Also, I need to put my Mosin somewhere…it’s just sitting in the corner of my room. I would like to hang it on the wall, but my mom isn’t too keen on that idea. Oh well.

More photos of my Mosin here.

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OMG! I bought a gun!

Yes, it’s true! Yesterday I purchased a true piece of history – a Russian Mosin Nagant M-91/30 rifle. The M-91/30 was the standard infantry rifle of the Soviet Army in the Great Patriotic War (known to us Americans as World War II). Due to California gun laws, I have to wait 10 days before I can bring it home, therefore I will not have any pictures of it posted here until July 10. Here’s a picture of someone else’s Mosin, though:

Kat went with me to buy it, and it turned out that the salesman was a former classmate of ours from St. Theresa School. How random is that??? Anyways…

A brief history of the M-91/30:
In the years following the Civil War the Red Army wanted a standardized weapon for their troops. This was due to the fact that dozens of different weapons were in use following the Civil War and keeping them all supplied with ammunition was very difficult. A committee began work on modernizing the M-1891 in early 1924. The first trial weapons were made in 1927. The final design was adopted in on 10 June 1930, by the head of the Red Army’s armaments department Ieronim Uborevich.

The primary focus of the new weapon was ease of production. To achieve this end the weapon was to have different front and rear sights, a rounded receiver, and metric measurements. The barrel was also shortened by 5mm and a new bayonet was added. These changes transformed the old M-1891 into a modern weapon that gave the Red Army a weapon was both easy to produce and use. The M-91/30 took only 13 hours to produce and its initial production run was 102,000 rifles in 1930.

The first uses of the M-91/30 in combat was during the Spanish Civil War where they were sent as foreign aid. They were also widely used in the repressive actions of the Stalinist regime. It also saw extensive use in the border conflicts with the Japanese in Manchuria and the Winter War.

With the outbreak of hostilities with the German Army in 1941, weapons production became the focus of Soviet industry. In this regard the M-91/30 proved to be the most widely manufactured Soviet weapon of the war. More than 12 million rifles and carbines were made in Izhevsk and Tula during the war.
By the end of the war over 17,475,000 M-91/30 rifles had been manufactured.

Soviet troops march to the front with their Mosins, Leningrad 1941.

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