Scotland: Shooting Skeet

Growing up my best friend's father repaired guns for a living.  I have seen, handled, and and even in a my positions in retail, sold firearms. A lot of people I know hunt, I've gone with them. I've even taken classes to get my CPL (Concealed Pistol License). All of this has been in an effort to curb my fear of guns. It causes a great deal of anxiety for me, I'm not really sure why. Anyone who knows me knows this. I stress out at the thought of selling them, handling them, shooting them, watching other people shoot them, and hearing about them.  It was unimaginable  would participate in shooting.

This obviously was something I wasn't planning on doing. When we were invited to this fantastic wedding in Scotland (Thank you and congratulations Lauren and Neil) one of the activities they planned was skeet shooting (or also called inanimate bird shooting).  Randy got very excited.

Brian got five out of five on one round. He was excited. 

I was apprehensive. My husband asked me to go, I told him I would just sit back and take pictures. This is my comfort zone.  My anxiety wanted me to stay away completely, I almost didn't even go at all, but I thought it would be interesting at least for the pictures.


When it came time to sign up, I was encouraged to give it a try. When the pencil broke signing my name I thought it was a bad sign.  It wasn't. It just meant the pencil needed to be sharpened and my name would look like a 3 year old wrote it. I shook it off.

It seemed a lot less restrictive than it is in the states. For example, we didn't have to fill out a bunch of forms or even a waiver. We didn't have safety goggles, but we did have ear muffs which helped to narrow down the sound so the instructor's voice so we could focus on how to aim.

Part of curbing the stress of the situation (for me) is understanding what I'm doing and watching how others handle the situation. When I was up I asked a lot of questions. I had him show me different parts of the gun and watched him load it, turn the safety on and off. He was even kind enough to let me take a practice shot just so I could see how the recoil felt.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was, we used a type of double barrel shotgun (the zombie killing kind) and we shot at the disks as they flew through the air. We got to do 5 birds each turn, 4 times. We shot at 20 of the lifeless stone flyers over the course of an hour or so. Some of the people in our group hit a lot of them. It was an amazing feeling the first time I hit one. Major adrenaline rush. Then followed by disappointment when I couldn't hit the next one. I got 5 out of 20 total and figured that was pretty good for a person who wasn't even going to show up. When I mentioned that it was hard on the shoulder he switched to a different kind of shotgun cartridge for me, "it will be lighter" and it was. Overall, they were very thoughtful and careful, which is exactly as I would hope.

I'm glad I went on this little excursion. The last part, which scared me the most and seemed to break all the rules of handling guns, we all took pictures of ourselves pointing the gun at the camera. The instructor showed us it was empty each and every time.  This made me happy.