The Cynic Says……

That’s the sound a .50 caliber Desert Eagle makes when fired. I found this out first-hand Saturday at the shooting range. My bud Sam decided to rent one because he’s always wanted to fire one and never really had the opportunity to do so… and since it’s only $5 to rent plus your ammo, we figured we might as well. Mind you I wasn’t about to fire that goddamn thing but it was certainly fun watching HIM shoot it. Mind you, he’s 450+ lbs and pretty strong so it wasn’t as much of a problem for him as it would have been for me (being 140 and all). Regardless he still ended up taking a step back when he fired it just from the sheer recoil of the gun. After he got more used to it, it still caused him to visibly rock backwards when fired. The worst thing of all was how ridiculously unreliable the gun was. Out of 20 shells, the gun jammed or otherwise failed to eject the shell probably 12 out of those times. A 60% misfire rate is far from appealing in my book. By comparison, he has a 9mm Glock 19 that has had probably 1000 rounds through it and he just had his first failure to eject this weekend. Amusingly, we also got a Walther P22 and a box of ammo for it and plinked off 100 rounds. It was quite fun but the gun literally feels like a toy gun or one of those guns you shoot when playing the arcade game "Time Crisis". Not much in the way of recoil, that’s for sure. Hell, it was so weak that even my girlfriend shot it! After firing about 20 rounds through the P22 I decided to step up and shoot his Glock. It’s quite a bit heavier, for starters… plus the recoil is quite a bit more noticeable but certainly not unmanageable. Needless to say it was pretty fun… we’ll probably go back next weekend and rent an MP5 and blow through some rounds.