Well, if you were 7 or 8, it's not a real surprise that you weren't a great shot with a full-size 19th-century military rifle. The surprise is that you could hold it up. :)

>I do remember one issue with it. If you worked the bolt slowly, you
>had to pry the spent casing out with your fingernails. If you worked
>it too quickly, on the other hand, you'd end up jamming the casing
>vertically, between the back of the receiver and the next cartridge.
>You had to work it juuuust right to make the spent casing pop out
>neatly and fly past your shoulder.

Oh, it actually had a magazine? That's cool. Most of the .22-caliber training Lee-Enfield versions I've read about are single-shot (presumably because rimfire magazine conversions are more of a hassle than replacing the barrel and bolt head). The kiddie-sized rifle I learned on was like that; it had a bolt action, but no magazine, so once you opened it and ejected the empty, you had to chamber another round by hand.

>The other bit that springs to mind is that I had a surprising wake-up
>call when I fired my first .30-06, after learning on the recoil-less
>SMLE.

Heh, I worked my way up to .30-'06 by way of .22 Magnum and .30-30, the latter of which is kind of in my sweet spot for centerfire rifle cartridges (in terms of how they feel to shoot, not necessarily performance on target). I'm still not a big fan of any of the full-power circa-1900 service rifle cartridges I've experienced—particularly 7.62x54mmR. That impression is, I'm sure, not helped by my Mosin-Nagant being one of the carbine (short-barreled) models, which tends to exaggerate the recoil, but dang, yo.

Which reminds me, I should get the Winchester 94 back from Dad sometime and do a Gun of the Week on it. Good ol' cowboy carbine, the Winchester 94.

My own personal first holy-crap-what-the-hey moment was the first time Gramp decided I was ready to shoot a .44 Magnum round from the Super Blackhawk. We'd been shooting .44 Special, which is significantly less powerful, and the next time he loaded it he put one .44 Magnum round in it. The catch was that I didn't know which one it was. Until I got to it, of course. I, uh, I noticed then.

(This wasn't just Gramp being random, btw, it was a drill to see if I could keep myself from anticipating the blast and flinching. A similar training trick involves leaving one or more chambers of a revolver empty but not knowing which ones; if you flinch when you pull the trigger and it's a dry fire, it's really obvious.)

That was the first, but not the best, I'm-not-sure-what-just-happened-but-it-was-impressive moment in my early firearms education, though. That was the first time I fired a replica Remington US Model 1863 "Zouave" rifle. This is a .58-caliber muzzleloading rifle with percussion ignition, and boy howdy, black powder or not, that is a big damn bullet and requires a sizeable charge behind it. Black powder is less powerful than its modern successors, but it makes a louder, deeper noise and a massive cloud of smoke (which is why modern powders are called "smokeless" even though they aren't really—it's all relative). Also, if you're left-handed like me and you fire a side-lock percussion rifle with your hands in the usual positions, the detonating percussion cap sprays fire and little bits of molten metal all down the inside of your right forearm. That isn't massively painful, and it's easily avoided with a long-sleeved shirt and/or a long enough glove, but it's certainly... arresting... the first time it happens.

>I don't think it's come up before, no. My mother was a sheriff in
>Arizona prior to, well, me.

Huh. Nifty.

>She changed careers to become a computer
>programmer* after I was born.

"Worse pay; better hours."

(Actually, I would guess better pay, better hours, but a quote is a quote. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.