Return to Target

Sunday afternoon at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office Public Safety Training Center. It's a mouthful, and those who frequent it call it PSTC. I first set foot here nine years ago to get fingerprints taken, not for any shenanigans, mind you. My employer scored a contract with the US Senate, and everyone assigned to it had to get a background check. Long story short, about twenty months later I'd completed the five-class defensive handgun curriculum at the PSTC, and I've been helping out occasionally as a range coach guiding folks who were in my spot get their trigger and muzzle disciplines drilled in. I also used to go almost every week to practice, no John Wick style fancy stuff, but the fundamentals of grip, stance, sights, and yes, trigger and muzzle. I found it enormously focusing and dare I say relaxing? Despite the explosions happening two feet from my face and up and down the bowling-alley-like range lanes?

Prior to today the last time I went to the PSTC was February to attend a day-long "Performance Skills Group" workshop - going as fast as you can in a controlled environment to see where the wheels come off your fundamentals. Doubles, triples, changing targets, and a fair number of rounds expended on Super Bowl Sunday. And then other things in life happened, so five months later I roll into the parking lot, check in at the armory, get two boxes of practice ammo and one box of “duty” rounds (jacketed hollow points that are issued to the law enforcement officers of the CCSO) plus a few paper targets, then set up on lane three.

The firing line today is more varied than the cliché would suggest: women, people of color, and, judging from the Camry with the trans-pride sticker and the hot-pink earmuffs at one end of the lanes, perhaps a trio who arrived together. Everyone seems unusually focused. The pistols are mostly stock-looking, many with optics, aimed at no-frills targets downrange. Very businesslike. The composition and mood of the range change constantly, so this is less a state shift than a snapshot. Enough gawking. On to my own business.

Muscle memory, neural pathways, practice makes permanent - from pianos to handwriting to keeping the trigger finger on the frame. The loading of magazines, pickup and grip, insert, tap, rack, retracted ready, then present, aim, commit, press. Return to target, repeat, finger back to home base, retract, drop magazine, set down the weapon pointed down range, then reload.

There's also an internal monologue that accompanies the motions, kind of like a program outputting information, warning, and error messages. INFO: blast disrupted sight picture, dot vanishes, re-establishing target, close enough, press. ERR: trigger slapped, shot likely compromised. WARN: flinching imminent, finger off trigger, re-establish target. INFO: third string of three shots, next round will empty and lock the slide. And the less dignified: shit, I jerked the trigger anyway. Okay, it's not quite as mechanistic as that, but the realtime analysis, feedback, and bitching is real.

I brought two handguns. A Sig P365 that I've had since early 2020, now fitted with an optic-cut slide and a Holosun green dot that cost as much as the firearm itself. The barrel is a garish rainbow-finished replacement because the original started pitting. As 9mm pistols go, it's about as compact as they get, and the recoil from standard load ammunition is enough to keep me from going with the +P "extra spicy" duty rounds. I go through the three magazines of carry ammo that I've had in there since last year, all at 10 yards, and all but one land in the "A" box. A bit low. Probably pushing a bit. It's okay.

Then at a bit more leisurely pace, I go out to 15 yards, using a 3" Post-It note as a target to see if the green dot is still reasonably on-target. Yes, it worked well enough to perforate a rectangle on a sheet of paper at 10 yards. Calibration. And again I'm reminded of my own biological limits - astigmatism turning the dot into a blurry bloom, no minute-of-angle precision, but a mean average of holes in and around a square piece of paper. Not particularly satisfying to have a scattershot set of holes, but again, it's okay. It will do, keeping me honest about how far a "reasonable" distance is.

The other handgun is a Palmetto State Armory Dagger Micro. I call it the "Frankenglock 43x," and it has its own tale documented elsewhere in this blog. It has just enough additional physical presence to alleviate the "bordering on too little gun for the caliber" characteristic of the P365. It also has a mounted optic - a much cheaper Holosun red dot. I try out the iron sights first and find it a pleasant change of pace, more than adequate for "A" box shots at 10 yards. Then the 15 yard Post-It with the red dot on. It's weirdly more accurate and thus rewarding.

Throughout the range session, I keep thinking about a video that appeared in my social-media feed that morning: someone drawing quickly from an appendix holster, then firing three to five shots in rapid succession. It's less about the recoil or even the performative flex that sticks with me, but the look on the person's face. When weapons are drawn, one has reached a dire failure state that may or may not have been avoided through de-escalation or withdrawal. I consider the sequence I have learned to interrupt whenever something feels wrong—finger off trigger, re-establish, reassess—and stack that against the fevered fury of someone going from zero to sixty in a blink. I don't have a response, let alone an answer.

130 rounds later (20 of the unspent are replenishing two of the daily carry magazines of the P365), I'm cleaning up around my lane, paying my tab at the armory, and heading out into a brilliant July afternoon that's just starting to heat up. Along the way I run into four folks with whom I've coached or learned from. There's a 101 class going on. Yeah, I've been out of the loop, taking care of life stuff. No, it's been all fun. Yes, I need and want to get back to coaching. Soon. Very soon.

Rolling out of the parking lot with the windows down, the tinnitus from the previous weeks’ rock shows feels figuratively blown away. Not because I’ve made ragged holes. Just the familiar centering I get from a range visit: attention narrowed, mistakes called out, everything else briefly quieter.

There’s still the obligatory field stripping and cleaning, but the pistols are locked away, the ammunition locked elsewhere, and all of that can wait.