First let me establish that I am about as far from a fan of weaponry as a Russian is from torching a Vodka factory after a tragic night of strip Mahjong (For those of you playing along at home, that would be – stereotypically speaking – very far indeed). I’m one of those bat shit crazy loonies who see violence as needless (when you fight fire with fire you get….more fire) and feel endless amounts of guilt for anything injured in my proximity, so much so that I actually watch where I step for fear of stepping on ants.

I wish that was an exaggeration.

Now that I’ve set about the ground rules it’s time to explain the conflict that gets our story moving ever so swiftly along. That conflict in this case is that a friend of mine (Who will be known as D-chan in this entry) got me to go “shooting” with him recently (at a shooting range that is) something I’ve been avoiding for about as long as I can remember.

My primary reasons for avoiding it started with me….actually feeling bad for the cardboard cutouts (and yes I did – I even apologised to them afterwards in some sort of futile attempt at easing my needless guilt) and ended with me being pretty sure I’d end up killing myself during the event.

The second point evidently didn’t come to pass but that was only because D-chan seems well versed in the Basjohnwillscrewhimselfoverintminusrightnow arts and prevented me from losing fingers no less than 3 times. However that didn’t stop the immense fear that rushed through me about half way through the MANRITUAL when I realised that the bullets could bounce back at us from the wall and while D-chan assured me that physics denied such a thing from occurring, his assurances (and the laws of physics) were evidently not heard by my bowels.

As for the actual shooting, I screamed like a girl the first (couple of) times but after a while I was too busy dodging the BURNING SHELLS OF DOOM to actually pay attention to my vocal activity.

I suppose I haven’t touched on why exactly I went shooting when I was dreading it so, and the answer to that is that D-chan is moving far far away (to Neverland or at least that’s what I’m told to make me stop crying) soon and essentially demanded I do it as a very odd sort of farewell activity.

But let’s get back to the fun me almost dying stuff shall we? Not content with the high pitched wails a standard pistol had me emoting, D-chan decided not only should I attempt firing a shotgun but that I also should stay true to my “gangsta” roots and fire two pistols at once in rapid succession.

The result (as I’ve recently confirmed via pieces of video footage that have already been “purged” – due to the above mentioned…..high pitch wailing) was me jamming up the shotgun at one point and discovering dud bullets in the next.

After a few hours of the above the ordeal was finally at it’s end. As a lovely souvenir I had a taste of gunpowder staining my mouth’s innards that was not unlike my own cooking (which ranges from black lumps all the way to somewhat less black lumps).

All in all my opinion on the whole matter remains rather mixed. I enjoyed the hangingoutwithanactualhuman factor but……remain quite firmly against ever doing it again if I can help it.

P.S.
Barely dodging fate’s glorious hobby of kicking me in the balls once again, it turns out I passed yet another one of my exams. This time my 70-640 Active Directory Configuration exam, which is basically 1/5th of what I need to achieve the MCITP:EA (Microsoft’s current gen Network Engineering qualification) .