I mean, thank you for your service and everything, Mike, but from what you've written, you were an intel officer in the reserves for seven years. I'm hard pressed to think of a gig in the United States Army that would give you less exposure to firearms that doesn't require a degree in medicine or divinity, and frankly I'm coming up empty.
"Although I had fired countless live rounds over the years on various military weapons ranges..."As a matter of fact, Mike, I'm pretty comfortable making the statement that I probably expend more ammunition in any given month than you did in your entire seven year career, since you likely never busted a cap outside of required qualifications.
As has been brought up by fellow blogger McThag, the U.S. Army pistol qualification is barely a sobriety test, let alone any sort of marksmanship challenge.
Mike also references the Army's neurotic clearing barrel culture:
"Even without any ammunition, before entering a building every soldier had to demonstrate his or her weapon was empty by pointing it down toward a barrel of sand and pulling the trigger, causing it to make the “click” sound of an empty weapon (hopefully)."Fortunately the Army appears to be taking baby steps toward getting over its fascination with all that unnecessary administrative gun-handling in the name of "safety".
Since you seem to like to harken back to stuff you learned from your part time gig twenty-five years ago to make you sound authoritative, Mike, here's a phrase you might remember from back then:
