Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

Ah, that was fun! I went to the shooting range today for the first time in 10 years or so. Here in Holland shooting and owning a gun is a big hassle actually. My friend Rutger and I decided to go join a shooting club at the beginning of this year: it's the only way you can (legally) own or shoot a gun here in Holland. But with all the paperwork etc. it took more than a month before we actually could go to the range. First you need a signed affidavit from the (local) police stating you're a good citizen and do not have a police record. Getting this used to be no problem and was handled automatically. But this has changed and now you need to pay € 30 for it and wait about a fortnight. Anyway: we managed to get through all the paperwork and this let to the point where we finally could go shoot today.

Because of the strict gun laws and such here in Holland you can't own a gun right away: you need to be a member of a shooting club for a year and then you can buy a gun. The good thing about that is off course that in Holland we have hardly any gun related problems like in the US. Also when you join a shooting club you have a 6 month probation period before you become a full member.

The latter also applies to the club we joined. It also means you can only shoot small caliber arms during those 6 months. So for the next 6 months I'll be 'plinking' away .22LR rounds, which is a bit of bummer.

After some hours of instructions and information about guns (no news for me there) we could finally go to the range and start shooting. I started of using a nice Ruger Mark III and I was happy that I still could hit my targets at 25 meters (27,3 yards). After doing that for about 30 minutes our instructors decided they'd gave us a taste of the good stuff so they allowed us to fire some 9mm, .38 and in my case even a Colt Python with some .357 magnum rounds. For me nothing new, but some people on the range never fired a gun before and were - off course - pretty impressed with the recoil. Funny thing was: I did better with the .38 and .357 than I did with the .22.

Anyway: now I have to continue shooting the wimpy .22 stuff for 6 months before I can switch to the real deal. Oh well, I guess you just have to be patient here in Holland.