Today was Mary's permit class. When we asked last week, the instructor kindly said I could audit it with her for no charge since I already have my permit. I figured I'd probably learn something, and I did.
He started by asking if she had any experience with handguns. She said yes, she had fired a few. OK, so he went over the basics very quickly (mercifully so) and then said with females he usually does the range qual test first. Then if they're unable to pass they won't have wasted an evening on classroom work and there'd be no charge. He'd said to bring 100 rounds of ammo so she could have 50 rounds on a practice target and then fire her 50-round qualification.
We said OK with a straight face. Thence to the range. Mar uncased her .22 semiauto, racked it open, set it on the bench aimed downrange with the muzzle never pointing anywhere but downrange and finger never on the trigger. She does this out of habit. I could see that he was watching like a hawk and nodding. She loaded 10 rounds in a magazine, slapped it home, closed the slide. He said go ahead. So she did. Ten rounds at a rate of about 1 per second or perhaps slightly slower. He asked if we had another magazine. She said yes. He said it'd be OK if I'd like to load mags for her since he'd seen that she is quite able to do it herself. That did speed things up some.
Well, it was like an assembly line. There'd be 10 pops in 10 to 15 seconds, a snack whack as she changed mags and closed the slide, whereupon the monotonously regular popping resumed while I refilled the empty mag. At 40 rounds he said hold it, he was moving the target downrange to 36 feet. Apparantly 36 feet is some sort of magic number in MN, a distance beyond which we should not shoot at an assailant with a weapon like a bat, knife, or anything but a firearm because MN courts presume that the shooter is not actually at immediate grave peril if the assailant is 36 feet or more distant. That's certainly reasonable but I didn't know it was so defined. When the target stopped at 36 feet he said she may resume firing. 10 more pops. We're done. He'd never said whether it was practice or qual, but I guess if it passes it's qual by default. She passed. Matter of fact, she maxed it. Scoring is 5 for hits in the X, 10, 9 and 8 rings, 4 for 7 ring, 3 anywhere else on the silhouette. Passing is
70% of possible 250 or 175. Mary had one hit in the 8 ring. The remaining 49 were 9's, 10's and X's. 100% for Mary. We weren't on the range 10 minutes. Wouldn't wanna waste his time watching the soft-spoken female miss a practice target.
The rest of the course went at warp speed. We were the only ones there so he could customize, which meant that he could skip at least half of the customary material because it was quite evident to him that Mary didn't need it and he could focus on the legal stuff. He was almost effusive with his comments about her flawless muzzle control, etc etc. Perhaps being a civilian firearms instructor has its hairy moments. All he said about the target was, "100%" I'd glanced at him a couple of times while she was shooting, I was stoking mags and he was watching holes keep appearing, one after another as regular as clockwork, in the middle of the target downrange. He did have this bemused look on his face.
Damn, that was fun!