Make My Day

The high spot of the travel schedule this week (arrived home three hours ago; leaving again in twelve hours for Europe) was the chance to go to the Smith & Wesson range in Springfield again and shoot some targets. We took some colleagues there for "team building" Monday evening and engaged in a little healthy competition. The winning team received Smith & Wesson hats while the losers got a copy each of People magazine - you know, the edition with the picture of Clay Aiken on the cover with the giant headline "Yes I'm Gay".I won't bore you with the details - you can always recap on my last visit here - but as a special treat they arranged for us to shoot the Smith & Wesson 500. This is the .50 caliber revolver that re-established S&W as the manufacturer of the most powerful production handgun in the world (according to them - it's not as though I checked).This beast is loaded with five gigantic cartridges, but the range officer was only putting one round in the chamber in case the firer panicked and dropped the gun on experiencing the recoil. Bear in mind that Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum produces about 900 ft.-lb. of muzzle energy while this gun produces almost 2600 ft.-lb. with its heaviest load. A single factory round costs about $4, apparently.I didn't even realize the thing was there until late in the session and, of course, I had to have a go. The range officer put the one round in and instructed me to fire double action (without pulling back the hammer), since the trigger was sensitive. It was indeed a beast, but not hard to fire, although it's definitely not for the nervous. I put in a fresh target and loaded up with five rounds. This time I fired single action (cocking before firing) simply because it's automatic for me to do it and I forgot not to; the trigger sensitivity was fine.Below is the target - I was pretty happy with that. And I'm fairly confident that this gun would, in fact, be capable of "taking your head clean off". So go ahead - make my day, and buy me one. Please.