Lazy Sunday with the Kids

My 11 year old has been begging for years for me to take her squirrel hunting. I told her when she could shoot a .410 I'd take her, but up until this year she thought it kicked, even with 2.5" shells. Well, last weekend when I let her try again she laughed off the .410 and even gave a 20 gauge a try, and low and behold she doesn't mind a 20 ga kick at all! So we did some practicing yesterday with some rotting pumpkins, she put 30 shells downrange in all before her shoulder started getting tender. If the weather's good we'll go hunting in 2 more weekends.



As we were shooting in the side yard my 4 year old saw her big sister shooting and started demanding to come shoot pumpkins too. She's sat behind me before with muffs and glasses on and watched me shoot in the past, but she's never asked to actually shoot before. I think what changed is last weekend she was watching me clean some AR's and I let her look through the red-dot and even let her pull the trigger a few times. Since this was her 4th birthday weekend I decided to oblige, and went inside to get a single shot .22.





It's a challenge with a 4 year old, she has no concept of trigger control yet so it was an exercise of holding her little fingers away from the trigger until I "aimed" and flipped off the safety and told her to shoot. In my opinion these years are about letting them have fun anyway, we'll work on safety as we go. 4 direct hits on the pumpkin and she was beaming ear to ear and ran off to tell Mommy what she'd done!



Here's a good action shot my 11 year old took, a .22 hit with some atomized pumpkin floating off in the air!


And the end of the day's carnage. Not a whole lot left of two jack o lanterns.

22250Rem said:

Good memories in the making right there..... For both young & old... I do pretty much the same thing with step grand kids at a small backyard range that a friend has. All done with .22's......... The older one is 15 and I recently tried to get her into firing my 20 ga. Mossberg 500 with light target loads..... She won't touch it but she's real experienced with .22 rifles and smaller handguns. Wish I had a .410..... They are sweet. I think she mentioned hearing about firing a shotgun from some friends at school. Probably heard horror stories about shotgun recoil like I recall hearing as a kid. I'm sure she'll get over it eventually, as she loves to shoot.

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The only reason my daughter gave the 20 ga a try is because she's REALLY excited about going squirrel hunting. I set up paper targets last week with a to-scale squirrel image, and from 25 yards with the .410 and 6 shot only 4 or so pellets hit the squirrel. Then I shot the 20 gauge and she could immediately see the advantage a 20 ga gives, the squirrel image was littered with little holes. She was still pretty scared and I left the decision up to her, but she decided it was worth at least seeing how much a 20 ga kicked. After the first shot she said that she definitely felt it, but it wasn't horrible. Since then I picked up a youth stock off eBay and I think that helped a lot when she shot yesterday. It's a 26" barrel and is pretty nose-heavy for her.