Gearing Up for Paintball: Part 2

Today I sat my firearm safety course, as the first step towards obtaining my firearms licence to be able to own my own paintball marker. The course was held at Belmont rifle range on the south side of brisbane and was run by the Queensland Millatary Rifle Club. I have to say, it is a course I highly recommend for anyone wishing to sit their firearm safety course.

The bulk of the course was theory, and covered laws involving safe storage, purchase, transport and licencing in the first part, of which most was common sense. What i didn't know, and found pretty surprising, is the definition of "firearm" in terms of the law is basically anything that can cause injury to someone, and also means (believe it or not) a deodorant can when used to cause harm, becomes classified as a firearm in the eyes of the law. By extension, if you purposely shot someone with a nerf blaster to deliberately cause harm to someone, then it's possible it could be classed as a firearm if anything legal happened about it.

Next we were shown the ins and outs of all kinds of guns, including air rifles, and were also shown how to make a firearm safe, and identify whether a gun is safe or loaded. We were also shown different firing positions and the advantages and disadvantages of them. sounds easy? It is. Even if you have absolutely zero knowledge of guns at all, you'll be competent by the end. All of the instructors were absolutely great. Very engaging and willing to help and answer any question, no matter how simple the question might be.

a couple of tests, and we were off to the range for a practical exam. We were shown again up at the range how to operate our guns and how to make them safe. Obviously, they weren't going to hand over a high powered rifles to us freshly clued in noobs to have a blast with, so we were allowed to use a Savage mark II rifle. It's a .22 caliber, bolt action with a 5 round box magazine, no scope, just iron sights.

Savage mark II .22 caliber that was used in the prac exam

It had basically no recoil and was very easy to use and apparently they are fairly cheap too, so should i decide to target shoot I am fairly certain that it may be my first rifle, but that's a different quest. Anyway, we took 5 shots each from prone, sitting, and standing positions at an A4 sized paper target at 25 metres. of those shots, 13 of my 15 landed on the target, and my shots from prone had a nice grouping with a couple landing dead centre, pretty good for my first time using anything other than a paintball marker or nerf blaster so I was stoked! after that we were given 10 shots from a semi auto handgun, which wasn't too bad, and i managed to knock over my brick second shot, but i still preferred the rifle.

And that was it! I passed my course along with my 2 mates and had my first shots with a proper firearm. The next step is to become a member of a paintball field, I'll cover choosing my field and applying for my membership in the next part of this article, but for now, I'm off to hunt some nerf related news to mix it up.