Nobody at the range ever shoots anything I do. Pretty much all empties are .22 rimfire, 9 mm, .223, and 7.62x39, mostly in steel cases. There are a few of those in brass, and a few empties in .380 ACP, .40 S&W, .45 ACP, 7.62x54R, and a few .410 hulls. I shoot 12 gauge, 20 gauge, .30-06 and .44 Magnum/.44 Special, and I have never seen anything in those chamberings as empties. The closest I found were a few .357 Magnum aluminum cases, 20 .308 brass empties, and a single .270 case. Shotguns are forbidden at my range so that explains few shotgun hulls (suspect the .410s came from Judges.)
When I shoot, I am typically the only one there with a "traditional" firearm and cartridge. Most shoot 9 mms from semi-auto pistols and .223s from ARs and just spray bullets in the general direction of the backstop. Anybody shooting a firearm and actually hitting the target is unusual.
Last weekend I was shooting my .44 SRH at the 25 yard bench and then an overweight guy in his 40s with a copstache dressed in digital camo quasi-BDUs with a body armor vest with a dozen magazine pouches and a big water bottle toddled over and was trying to teach a pudgy, black-dyed-hair woman of about his same age dressed in a similar but all-black getup "tactical shooting." The lady couldn't even shoulder the AR-15 due to her bulky getup, and when she did get it shouldered, she couldn't even keep half of her shots on the 2' x 1' paper targets. That's if she remembered to pull back the charge handle to chamber a round and didn't have a mis-feed, of which there were a lot. Her favorite word was obviously the F word as she said it a lot. She and copstache then moved up to about 10 yards from the target to shoot one of the Glocks he had, and I followed them to shoot at the same distance so I could keep shooting, safely. She shot a 17 round magazine and had two hits on the paper while I kept an entire cylinder in the 3" bull. Copstache shot two shots about 10" apart and then his Glock had a failure to eject. I reloaded, popped a few more into the bull, and laughed to myself when he talked about how important it was to use a semi-auto to deliver the most lead downrange the quickest despite the failures to chamber and eject. Copstache then mentioned, oh, we're not at 7 yards, we're at 10 yards, that's why you missed. She shot an entire magazine and kept about 5 on the paper, and then they went back to the bench. He shot a group with the scoped AR that was no better than my group with the SRH, and then she proceeded to miss with an entire magazine. He then saw that I was shooting the SRH as well as he was shooting his AR, he sprayed the Glock from 25 yards and landed only one hit on the paper. I was shooting light target loads of 7.5 gr Universal pushing a 240 grain SWC which is about as loud as a 9 mm. At the end just for fun I shot a couple cylinders of cartridges loaded up with a full load of 2400 as my revolver shoots that combination very, very well (and loudly with a bunch of muzzle flash) and one of the groups was as good of a group as I'd ever shot and much better than anything the guy had shot with his scoped AR. Dyed hair and copstache certainly took notice of that and copstache said, "well, criminals can't shoot anywhere near that well so you should be safe." :mrgreen:
I had much the same reaction when I was working up a .30-06 load for deer hunting. I have a blued-and-walnut bolt M70 with a Leupold 3-9x40 and was shooting from the 100 yard bench and the guy next to me was shooting a .308 AR-10 with a giant scope and a tripod. AR-10 guy shot half a box through his rifle and shot a shotgun pattern. I was shooting with my elbows resting on the bench and shot about a 1 1/2" 5 shot group with IMR 4895 and a 150 grain Hornady Interlock. AR-10 guy looked over and wondered what I was shooting, was that a Creedmoor or some target rifle? I told him it was an '06. An '06? But that's a grandpa gun! I reminded him that the '06 won two World Wars, and for good reason. :mrgreen:
