St. Patrick's Day -- IRA Style

Ethan and I made another much-too-often-for-mom's-taste visit to our friends from the IAWCA for their annual St. Patrick's Day Fun Shoot. The weather was a bit chilly, but nothing like the nighttime tracer shoot. The picture below is of Ethan enjoying a light snack while becoming familiar with the workings of a Browning M2 .50 caliber fixed gun (I figure after all these times watching the shooting I should start learning what they are).
I am always surprised about how good they are with kids at these events. They expect everyone to follow the range rules, but most everyone is very friendly and welcomes questions from the kids who are there. We get a chance before the shooting begins to walk around and look at everything, and "Mr. Social" doesn't shy away from anyone.

Ethan got a special treat this year thanks to a younger guy who I am just going to tell myself isn't a skinhead of some sort. After the first round of shooting was over and the range was declared safe (yeah, insert jokes about rednecks with guns here), everyone was allowed to go inspect the car that had been one of the targets. Ethan found one of the spent .50 cal cartridges that they had missed while cleaning up, and he tried to return it to the owner. As a reward for offering to return it, Ethan was allowed to keep the cartridge. You would have thought it was Christmas morning. We cleaned it up and it now sits proudly in his "treasure box" at home.
Here's another couple of Sally's favorite pictures of the positive influence I am on our son. At least this year the vehicle wasn't on fire (we were all disappointed). Ethan was fascinated with the holes made in the car and kept wanting to touch everything. He has a good heart, though, because he was very worried that they'd open fire while the guy towing the car was still out on the range. Safe to say he grasps at least the basic concept of the danger of guns.













We had another fun time and now have to wait until the "Pumpkin Shoot" in November for more pictures like this. Below are some random images and a short video clip of the .50 cal in action (which seems to consist mostly of clearing jams).

Note:The "poppers" that you see exploding in the video are bags filled with about two cups of ANFO (ammonium nitrate prills), which put on a pretty good show when hit. After just doing several Google/Wikipedia searches to get the technical terms for ANFO, I'm sure that I'm now on some kind of FBI watch list. I doubt that my apparent associations will help with that...