I fired a real gun for the first time (that I recall) today. Two of them, actually. The family members who bought guns from my Uncle Joe’s estate at auction recently brought them to Thanksgiving dinner, and we took them to the back yard after eating.
I fired two antique guns, four total shots. They were a 1907 two barrel shotgun and a mid to late 1800s small four barrel pistol. I don’t think I hit any of the targets we had set up.
I fired both barrels of the shotgun. I didn’t have a problem with the kick from the first shot, but the second one kinda hurt my shoulder. May have just relaxed my stance too much after becoming comfortable from the first shot. I found the barrels hard to open. It was cool how the shells eject themselves automatically with a stream of smoke, but I may have slightly hurt my thumb doing it.
The four barrels of the pistol were loaded, but only two of them fired for me. The trigger pushes forward to “cock”, then pulls back to fire. I found the action a little hard to do for my small hands, and sometimes held it with two just to give my finger more freedom of movement. Sometimes I must not have done the action completely and nothing happened. It also seemed to require holding the trigger for a moment before it actually fired. There were a couple clicks without firing as I rotated through the barrels and counted two shots. I went around again a time or two but it wouldn’t fire. I handed it off to my cousin, who reset the bullets and eventually got them to fire. Not the most reliable home defense option I guess. The kick from the gun was almost nothing. It’s a black powder gun, so it threw off cool smoke and a flash. It was really difficult to aim, and even stepping closer, I didn’t hit the targets.
I don’t really have interest in having a gun, but it was kind of cool to try them out once.
I don’t know if it was just allergies, the smoke from the guns, the solvent they cleaned them with, or something else, but something was bothering my eyes, nose, and lungs a bit for a while after shooting, with coughing, sneezing, itchiness, and dryness.