Anyone who had done target practice knew that, to prevent stray bullets from injuring people during live-fire shooting, there usually had to be something tall and substantial behind the targets. This was generally called a target stop.
Li Long's village lay on the southern edge of the Junggar Basin, dozens of kilometers from the mountains. They could hardly make a special trip to the mountains just for target practice.
So finding a target stop was not all that easy.
Fortunately, with everything frozen in winter, the dam on the northern side of Big Haizi Reservoir became a ready-made target stop.
Not only their production team but the whole township did its shooting here. Northern Xinjiang might be vast and sparsely populated, but who could guarantee there wouldn't be someone in whatever direction you happened to fire?
Safety still came first.
Militia shooting practice was not as formal as army training, but it had all the basics: an ammunition distributor, a firing line, a waiting area, and so on. It was all out in the snow anyway, so they could simply mark out an area. The targets were set up a hundred meters away, only twenty or thirty meters from the dam, so even shots that went wide would generally end up in the dam.
The rifles needed to be zeroed before target practice. The weather was good today-overcast, so there was no need to account for false glare.
False glare was actually a little reflection that sunlight produced around the front sight and rear notch when someone aimed. It could affect shooting accuracy.
Li Long had also been chosen as one of the men to zero the rifles. After all, he had used guns more than the others over the past year.
The more you shot, the more familiar you