The Bitter Rifleman

I tried to take the .308 out again yesterday afternoon and I ended the day in seething bitterness. To those who know me personally that wouldn't be surprising. Bitterness is a hallmark of my character.

I have built the most high performance rifle I can financially muster, and I didn't do it to be imprisoned by one hundred yards. To me, one hundred yards is for sighting in, muzzle loaders, and for people who only hunt with the 'thuty thuty.'

I want more.

There was a time when I could take my rifle to any one of numerous fields and power lines and shoot as far as the eye can see, but those days have long past. Those fields and such have been leveled to make way for subdivisions to house all of Virginia's illegals and to make room for the hippies that can no longer find a place to live in Fairfax. Out of those on my side of the family, I'm the only one with a yard the size of a snowflake and the only one with the motivation and initiative to make a long straight line with which to direct high velocity pieces of copper. It burns me to have the will but not the space.

You would think that with the passion for shooting that everyone in my family possesses, that we would have our shit together and have kick ass facilities. You would think.

These days I get about two hours a month to do what I want to do, and I hate to piss away the first hour soaked in sweat while swinging a machete or pulling trees with my truck and a chain. I want to be able to shoot.

Such is how things went yesterday. I'm using the Optimal Charge Weight technique to find the ideal load for my .308, and I blew it because things went Tango Uniform during my shoot. I had to pack it up early.

I was standing in the mud in the middle of the woods; my chrono was not taking readings like it's supposed to; my groups sucked; and when one of my rounds clipped one of the chrono stakes because it was slowly turning during the shoot, I threw in the towel. Really it didn't matter; I didn't have the time to finish anyways.

I think it's time to find a pay-to-shoot range that offers some distance. At least until I can sell my house and move the hell out of Virginia. That's not likely to be any time soon; I bought my house about eight months before the housing market took a shit on us all, so I lost quite a bit on it. Now is the time to start looking though, and my requirements are to be able to walk outside on my back porch and shoot a thousand yards or better without pansy ass rich people from the state's most ritzy neighborhood calling the Sheriff's Department on me. Oh, and I don't want to pay a quarter of a million dollars for an acre like here in Virginia, and it has to be a gun friendly state.

Any ideas?