All in a clay's work: Skeet shooting at Varney's Clay Sports

In that prized position over the family room fireplace - where keen shooters might display a pair of bony antlers or a taxidermy goose - I could mount half a dozen pigeons. Orange, disk-shaped clay ones.

The idea is absurd, of course, because I don't have a fireplace. And gathering those scattered clay bits in the field at Varney's Clay Sports in Richmond would have been no easy task.

My colleague Wendy Almeida and I headed out to Varney's last week for a pair of stories we were working on for Sunday's newspaper. I'd been clay shooting before (during last year's sporting clays walk-on at LL Bean) and found great pleasure in pulling a trigger and not killing a damn thing.

So to Varney's we went for a skills refresher and a few rounds of shoot 'em up.

Varney's is the home of the "Have Gun, Will Teach" shooting school, and Brad Varney himself is confident he can teach anyone to shoot. If you can swing a hammer and hit a nail or swat at a fly on your arm, Varney says he can have you skeet shooting in no time. He'll load you up with plenty of stories, anecdotes and a bit of wise cracking along the way, too.

He'll also make you do a host of weird stuff before you ever get near the skeet field.

Like hold out a handy T-shaped piece of PVC piping, which Varney uses to test your eye dominance.

He also put a sticker over my left eye to fog its vision (so it wouldn't squabble with my right eye over who was in charge. Left eyes can be so bossy).

And you'll learn the rules of the range, like keeping your gun pointed down range when loading and wearing proper eye and ear protection. "Don't kill anyone" wasn't on the rules board, but I think it was implied.

We worked on proper aim inside (we aimed at knots in the wood, but BP executives would've been better).

Then out to the skeet field, where we started at station one, next to the tall trap house.

I missed the first two clays, but with some tips from Varney (keep your eye on the front of the target) I was able to shatter quite a few.

Varney even gave us a tour of the sporting clays course he has in the nearby woods. It's a hunter's game, he said, and akin to "playing golf with a shotgun." He also showed us how the manual trap machines launch the targets with the simple pull of a lever.

Also, amid all the shooting patches, student photos and shooting accouterments in the office, my favorite article was the bumper sticker: "I just got a gun for my wife. It was the best trade I ever made." (Varney doesn't mean that. His wife, Alyss, is the sweetest lady and the one keeping things going behind the scenes.)

For more on skeet shooting lessons, check www.varneysclaysports.com.

Individual lessons are $50/hour or $75/hour for two people.