SGT Valencia Popup Range Fun
6So for Individual Weapons Qual drill at Camp Roberts I had to be a range safety for the whole weekend. Standing in the sun watching people shoot all day and telling people put their weapon on safe, drop the mag, and lock the bolt to the rear is not my idea of fun. However we needed to burn through the extra rounds at the end of qual and lookie who gets to do it! I got 5 20 round mags to dump on the popups. Got to shoot standing, kneeling, and prone. Also got to shoot semi and burst fire. I had a pretty bad jam I had to drop the mag and really pull on that charging handle to clear it, probably a bad round got stuck in the chamber.
This is a standard Army qualification range that I haven't gotten to shoot at in probably half a decade! I forgot how fun it is to shoot popup targets and watch them fall. Its like a shooting gallery with assault rifles. The targets range from 50-300 meters. I can knock the 50-250 pretty fast. 300 takes me some time. It was a fun burning up taxpayers dollars and helped me increase confidence in this weapon system!
I am shooting a M16A2 with an Aimpoint M68 CCO (red dot) on it. The CCO makes engaging these targets a piece of cake.
The clip at the end was after I got to dump 150 rounds downrange and trying to get the smoke coming off the barrel but my phone crashed so the barrel had cooled down but you can see what I was shooting.