The Doh! Moments remind me of a story. Speaking of going shooting and no keeping a gun handy

About a year ago I was out in the desert outside of Tucson and doing some moving and shooting practice on a few targets with a friend of mine. It’s about 11pm and we think we are totally alone, as we are way out of town. We wrap up shooting for a while and the two of us are down range picking up brass, all hunched over with flash lights, just talking about form, and women, and so on. As we are doing this a car pulls up next to our campsite, where ALL of our guns were, and aims its headlights right at us. We are sitting there, fully blind to what this guy is doing and he spends a few long seconds in his car just looking at us.

The guy is in a really old beat up car so we put police out of the equation right away, which just makes us more nervous. He starts shouting out of his car, asking about what we are doing and what we are up to and so on, and you can tell the guy just isn’t right in the head. Words are slurred and he isn’t always making sense. He starts asking questions we don’t like to answer, about where we live, if we have women at home alone, what/how many guns we have. My friend is an Army sniper(shame on him) starts moving off to one side and I start going the other direction as best we can, making our way towards our guns, real slow, as he is going on with his questions. I did my best to keep my strong side away from him, didn’t have anything on me, but I figured it would be best if only I knew that.

After about the 2 longest minutes I had in a long time, I am standing behind my truck’s engine, trying to get to my rifle, and my friend is behind my truck, in the dark with his rifle. The guy eventually took off, no idea who he was or what he was up to, but we sure got the wrong vibe and got caught completely unprepared.

We felt un-believably stupid that night. The deserts out there are generally not a safe place, at night especially, and some fool weirdo is the least of one’s worries, but he caught us, just lucky it wasn’t a drug runner or something of that ilk. I switched form a one-point sling to a two point sling, so as I could pick up ammo with my rifle on after that night.


I have a few storys from the desert come to think of it