First shoot with the new pistol AAR

Took the Para Carry 12 out for a first shoot (FINALLY) today. I was joined by 3 coworkers, 2 of whom owned guns of their own (worshipers at the altar of Glock). One person who came had fired a gun only once before in his life.

The Para is brand new and I've never put a round through it. The total by the end of our 2.5 hour play session had 200 rounds through it and another 300 rounds combined through the 3 Glocks that were on hand.

The Para performed reasonably well. I was expecting some issues starting out. It wasn't broken in, and with the temperature inside the indoor shooting range hovering around 40 or so, and the outdoor temperature being 20, the gun was pretty cold.

I also was working with the new glasses covered by shooting glasses. Needless to say there were to many new things here for me to overly worry about accuracy.

Starting off I had plenty of jams. The first magazine had a failure to feed. The second magazine went smoothly. A repeat of the first magazine had several jams this time, mainly feeding problems. This continued for about half the shoot as I debated whether it was the ammo, the magazine, the pistol or combos thereof. Finally I just took the magazine that seemed linked to the biggest issues out of the equation all together. The gun smoothed right up and the last few rounds of shooting with the good magazine functioned smoothly. Time will tell for sure, but I'm pretty sure the first magazine is going to need some work. On a side note, 100 of the 200 rounds fired were Winchester. That ammo seemed to produce the most malfunctions. The last 50 rounds were Blazers and they had zero malfunctions with the good magazine.

The Para has the Light Double Action trigger on it. This leads to a smooth pull for me and, as I got used to the gun and the awkward vision setup from the glasses, I found that I was routinely grouping my shots in an area maybe a little bit bigger than a fifty cent piece. This was pretty much true for all distances from 10 to 25 yards. We didn't shoot any further out than that, this time. I did find that either I or the gun was shooting low. I suspect it's me. When I focused on trying to correct for shooting low, I started shooting to the left of center. Clearly, in all my downtime from shooting I have developed a problem with my grip and sight picture.

The new guy had a ton of fun shooting all the different guns. Sadly, with mine he also learned more than necessary about malfunction clearance. However on the drive back from Salisbury all he could talk about was how badly he wanted a gun of his own to go target shooting with. Score another convert for the good guys!

In conclusion, I think that with the gun close to being broken in I really like it. I have to work on the bad magazine, really make certain that I have the kinks worked out the gun, and then I need to spend some time getting my old mojo back. Fun times all around, regardless.

Now if you all will excuse me, I have some cleaning to do. :)