A NeoBohemian Afternoon

I introduced a friend of mine to firearms today. Amanda has a bunch of friends like myself who are firearms enthusiasts, and was feeling a little left out of the clique of capability. She approached me with some questions, and I volunteered to take her out to the range.
So this morning I packed a brace of .22 pistols, and another of .22 rifles into the backseat of the truck and headed into town to meet her. After a short conference at her house to figure out where the shooting range was, we headed out to get lost. What passes for a range is an apparently rather of the way place, so after driving through a few yards I decided to head out of town to a piece of ranchland easily accessible by county road, with good hillsides for backstop in lieu of a proper range.
I began with the lecture on the four rules of firearms safety, and a basic introduction to types of firearms, the mechanics there-of, and the chemical action of burning gunpowder/expanding gas. She was very much into it, and asked several intelligent questions, and to her credit didn’t try to rush through it. Moving on to the shooting we began with a bolt-action .22lr rifle, to get her started one shot at a time. She did quite well for never having handled, much less shot, a gun before, but the gun was a little long for her small frame, so we stepped back to a Ruger 10/22 semi-auto. She did extremely well with this, keeping 90% of her shots inside an 8” target, at about 20yards, from a standing position.
As we progressed later into the afternoon, we moved on to the .22 pistols, with which she did well, though not quite as much so as with the rifles. We finished up, after much begging on her part, with my 1911 pattern .45. The .45 was a serious step backwards, in that she started anticipating her shots and flinching quite badly, but she had fun – although she didn’t enjoy the .45 as much – and was excited at the suggestion of going and doing it again soon.
After I’d shown her the rudiments of cleaning guns, we adjourned for today, and headed back into town for lunch. A scrumptious lunch at a nice little eatery, with questions about firearms history, and conversation moving from medieval warfare to modern science, was followed by a jaunt to the gunstore to pick up a few catalogs for her perusal, at which time we retired to a coffee shop looking out on the towns plaza, ordered coffee and sweets, and took up residence in the corner, smothered in deep, comfy, chairs by the window, with out gun catalogs spread out before us.
There was much talk of firearms design, manufacturers, and differences/advantages there-of, and coffee, and idle mindless talk of life, sex, cars, religion, rain, people, politics, more science, more sex, etc. We spent a few hours there, chatted with friends as they came and went, drank coffee, talked, laughed, schemed, plotted, and decided upon the fates of the world. It began to rain sometime around six in the evening, a light rain, under light grey skies, so we decided to go for a walk. Our conversations continued as we walked around town for another hour or so in the light rain, finally ending up back at my truck, where-upon I took her home.
It was a good day.