So this 50-year-old guy with an enormous arsenal of weaponry starts schmoozing with me. “I’m want to get into the social aspect of shooting,” he says, without the slightest tracer of irony. “Everyone I’ve met around here has been really nice.” “Oh you get assholes,” I counter, in a blogger-know-thy-self kinda way. “Then again, a gun range is the perfect place to test the old adage ‘an armed society is a polite society.'” Did I really yell the word “adage” in a place lousy with gunfire? Yup. Still, my new friend was more than happy to let me shred some paper with his Izhmash Saiga-12 semi-automatic shotgun. (Some nice photos of the man himself and the gun itself after the jump.) I didn’t fire all 12 (?) possible rounds, nor concentrate on aim. But still, wow. Low recoil, fast-as-you-can-pull firing, Russian reliability [sic] and LOTS of lead downrange. No wonder this bad boy is the new best friend of three-gun competitors.
Looks like a Saiga shotgun with some kind of huge magazine. Being as how the Saiga is basically a prettied-up semi-auto AK (the same gun you referred to as a POS yesterday) I'm a little surprised. Are you being recruited into the Kalashnikov Kult?
I knew you'd get that! And this was like no Kalashnikov I'd ever fired. So yes. Anyway, I'll put the video up in a mo.