Oohh, the lot of you.
Clean miss. Every one. The key word here is
relax.
Big boomers and recoil engines have there place. It's bright and early on a Saturday morning after a good refreshing night's sleep and a good dose of brain-scintillating coffee. Gotta make those liberal yuppies that moved close to the range and who constantly complain about the noise really regret closing that pretentious bar with the ice buckets full of vodka shots last night.
For the perfect Friday happy-mood maker, you need centerfire plinkers of absolute reliability, easy-to-accomplish accuracy, and mild recoil and report. This allows for delicately applied force over distance with thoroughly satisfying precision, but withOUT the effort required to control a handful of violent rocket exhaust or withstand face-slapping muzzleblast.
Centerfire is a requirement by virtue of the neccessity of sufficeint "thwack factor". Plinking also needs reactive targets, but start off with something easy to hit initialy. Getting the satisfied glow of success is a great warm up to more challenging targets later.
Guns should be things like PPC revolvers in .38 Special, .44 Triple Locks, 1955 Targets, SAA's, target grade 1911's with match loads, that sort of thing. NO magnums. NO high-intensity rounds like 9mm or other such high-pressure numbers. Booms, not bitter cracks. Pushes, not abrupt snappy flips.
Long guns are represented best by pistol-caliber rifles like leverguns or Lightning pumps. Ruger PC carbines, Marlin camp rifles, and even the M-1 Carbine can work here so long as the high-pressure rounds don't find their way into handgun mags. The upper limit for guns of this ilk are .45-70's loaded with factory 405-grain bullets at blackpowder speeds, preferrably in a somewhat heavy single-shot. No "Marlin only" loads. We're trying to wind down here, so leave the Earsplitten Bonethumpum Loudenboomers at home.
Targets start out with milk jugs or coffee cans at fairly close ranges. Work your way down to charcoal bricquets tossed underhanded as far as convenient. Steel gongs or flipper targets are good choices also, if they're handy.
The point here is easy, satisfying fun. Avoid annoyance at popping and pounding. Steer clear of the irritating frustration of difficult targets. Try not to concentrate any more than absolutely neccessary. This isn't a competition or an improvement drill.
The key word here is
relax.
