Does your way of airgunning make sense? – Brutally honest chronicle of NONsense
My airgunning story started out very naive and harmless. And I don’t know your airgunning story. Maybe yours is much worse than mine? I won’t judge you. I’m way too deep in it myself....
It started in 2017. I was thinking of getting a gun for some fun shooting, maybe some special time for son and dad. So I did....
● August 11, 2017: I bought a gun with iron sights – and literally on top of that it also came with a scope – for a whopping $99.
● Dec. 8, 2017: Then I bought a scope that cost more than the gun and the previous scope. For 123$. Now I have three ways to aim at my target – two scopes and iron sights. Ironically, I only have two eyes. And one of them is usually closed when I shoot.
● April 20, 2018: One has to go with the times, and since everything is digital now I bought a couple apps for that cell phone of mine. Now I can calculate right there in the field the trajectory (in hundredths of an inch) of my pellet to the target – and then scan and score where it hits (I never miss, of course). And a digital caliper measures my group size, with the accuracy of half of a thousandths of an inch. Because my shooting is just that accurate and requires that kind of digital sophistication. I only spent $40!
After April, things accelerated somewhat, not to say, got out of hand.
● June 2, 2018: Then I felt I wanted to mount the scope differently on the gun and adjust it better. For the price of those new scope mounts I could have bought a whole gun, with scope, and with scope mounts – and still have 3 dollars in change (well, add to the $102 the $15 shipping from the UK). Now I have three mounts for the two scopes. Yeah, in gun arithmetic this squares just fine.
● June 12, 2018: At this point, having one gun, with two scopes and iron sights, I can see really well where my pellets should hit. But I kept wondering how far my gun was away from the target, and my wondering was to the tune of $77 – the price of a used range finder.
Because I spend my money wisely. Now I KNOW that it’s 5.5 yards from my muzzle to my quarry, the varmint snail on my flower bed. And 338.5 yards to the abandoned barn with the tin roof I’ve been trying to hit for the 67th time.
● Sep. 28, 2018: If I have two scopes, I think I should also have two distance measuring devices (besides the distance estimation of the parallax setting). You know, I should check on my range finder once in a while to make sure it’s working properly, right? And I feel it necessary to measure the distances to my targets down to the inch – because the half yards of my range finder are not precise enough of course.
So, what is one to do? I got myself a measuring reel, all of 300 feet long. Because my gun easily shoots that far with its measly 12FPE. At $45 not a whole lot less then the electronic range finder, but two is better than one, and inches are better than yards. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Say, can you relate at all to my experience?
● Aug. 21, 2018: To date I knew exactly how far my pellets flew until they hit my target, but I really NEEDED to know how fast they flew there, and with what BC (not BS, but the two seem closely related). So, I bought a shooting chronograph. For $96. That’s a whole 3 dollars less than I spent on the gun with the scope, I’d say that chrono was quite a bargain!
Incidentally, four months before that, I wrote a note to self into my shooting records: “I think I will refrain from measuring my own BCs – I’m not a competition shooter, I have a very, very low end gun, and I rather spend $200 on a hunting trip than on two* boxes [chronos] that measure speed of tiny pieces of lead...!” | *[two chronos for simultaneous measuring velocity at the muzzle and the target]
Don’t judge me – isn’t a man entitled to change his opinion?!
● Sep. 11, 2018: Now, after about a year of having the gun, I have spent $155 total on thingies to shoot at. If I’m successful at what I do with the gun I end up destroying these paper thingies. 155 dollars worth of hole riddled paper is quite a success, don’t you think? Well worth the investment – worthy of gracing the insides of a trash can. (Yes, you can recycle that if you like, much better than the other thingies I shoot at, them varmint thingies.)
● Sep. 11, 2018: Also, during year one of having the gun, I have spent $500 on those other little thingies that shoot out the gun and onto the paper thingies. And when the two meet, both of them thingies get so messed up, and then they are both junk, double junk – double success, I’d call that. Works for me.
Reflection:
The logic of all this eludes me somewhat. However, the irony that a 99 dollar rifle requires over 1,000 dollars spent on paraphernalia is eating away at me ($1,153 to be exact, that’s more than 11 times the price of the rifle).
It’s like buying a 100 dollar cordless drill, and spending 1,000 dollars on drill bits and batteries. It’s like buying a $10,000 car, and spending $100,000 on tires, paint, leather, stereo, tuneup, etc. It’s like buying a $100,000 house, and putting furniture in it worth a million bucks.
Does this make sense? To anybody reading this?! Anybody?!?
(O, yeah, I know, it makes sense. To you and to me. Just no-one outside of the gun community.)
Remind me again, why am I spending all this money?
(Yeah, I got bitten. By the airgun bug. Badly. That’s all.)
PS: Oh, you’re saying my rifle is way too cheap and low quality for all the high-tech accessories I have bought for it. It just doesn’t fit. It’s not congruent. –
Yeah, you are sooo right! See, I don’t like to live with incongruity! I had to endure it for a year with all these expensive accessories that really didn’t match the gun in the first place.
So, the way forward toward inner harmony is to buy a more expensive, higher quality gun than what I currently have.
(If you have a .22 Kral Puncher Breaker Silent Synthetic for me, I’d be interested. You help me restore my internal congruity, and I help you by putting money in your pocket.)
PPS: You know, for inner congruity and stuff, I wonder if getting the Kral would raise the bar high enough for me to justify getting a LabRadar next....