Nighttime shooting at the big Sandy

Roses are red, violets are blue, shooting at night, is fun to watch.... Don't forget to click the pics.

I've shot machine guns before so they weren't all that interesting to me, but I really liked the big guns. I wonder if I could tow one of these behind the bronco. I could really clear out a lot of boondocking spots toten firepower like this.

I had a great time at the shoot last night. The night Shoot started at dark which turned out to be 7 o'clock, and I got there early and set up my tripod in a pretty good location that wouldn't have been available half an hour later; it got pretty crowded.

I think the only time my readers have seen a picture that I took with my camera on a tripod is some pictures of the Moon, the Milky Way, and now the Big Sandy night shoot. Needless to say, I don't like using a tripod; it's in the way; even though it's carbon fiber, it's still fairly heavy, and I'd rather brace myself against something instead of toting around and setting up a tripod. But last night called for it, so I had to deal with the inconvenience.

I need to give everyone a little background on what goes on at the Big Sandy shoot so the pictures will make some sense First, it's not a contest; everyone is there shooting just for the fun of it and meeting others that appreciate the same hobby as you do. So the gun range tries to make the three days of the shoot as fun for the shooters as possible, so here are the things they do.

The shooters are shooting across a valley. And there are various kinds of targets at distances ranging from 100 meters to about a mile and a half. So there are hundreds of targets. Some targets might be just an empty cardboard box, and some targets are wrecked cars. Some of these empty cardboard boxes might contain an explosive like half a stick of dynamite; others might include a whole stick of dynamite. And the wrecked cars might be empty, or they might contain a full propane tank with a stick of dynamite taped to it. Does that sound destructive? You're darn right it does, and everybody loves it.

The night shoot has the same type of empty or explosive targets that have been replenished when the range stops all shooting at 4 o'clock or 1600 hrs. If you still fit into your military uniform. When they start shooting again at dark, the area is, of course, pitch black, so the shooting range crew will launch military-style flares, I'm talking super-bright, slowly floating down to the ground, in various colors, to light up the target area, or as some of the shooters refer to it as "the battlefield."

A few of the shooters, the rich ones, will shoot tracers, which can easily be seen at night, and leave a light trail as they go for the target. But tracers are extremely expensive, so most people shoot regular bullets, which you can't see at night. And the only way you know the bullet was even there is when something explodes.

All this is great fun to watch but far too expensive for the average person to be able to afford to do, especially with the cost and scarcity of ammunition for the last few years.

                                                                                                                                                         Theboondork

Machine guns are expensive to buy, complicated to maintain, and they can run through a thousand dollars worth of ammunition in a very short afternoon. I didn't see many young people that owned these guns, it was all old geezers with enough free time, and enough spare money to afford a hobby like this.

This is what happens when you park your car in the wrong area at a machine gun shoot.

If I could buy a Canon it would have to be a small one, maybe something that looked big but shot 22's.

At night everything changes, targets get harder to see and the flares are blinding. Somebody shooting green tracers that's the green streak across the middle of the picture.

Orange flares slowly rain down over  "the battlefield" lighting up hundreds of acres of the Arizona darkness.

The red flares slowly descending turn the landscape into an eerie red glow, as things explode all up and down the firing line, very much like a real battlefield.

Being a Baby Boomer I was raised on two kinds of movies, cowboys and Indians, and World War II. I made this picture black and white because it reminded me of every battle scene in old World War II movies.