As someone who has never touched a firearm, I'm curious: what are you doing firing thousands of rounds? Is it target practice?

Yep target practice. There's different types. There's obviously your, slow, precise target practice focusing on tight groupings and hitting the target where you want to hit it however there are a bunch of other more specialised drills for training reaction speed and ability to actually perform at a moments notice.

While your initial drills start out using relatively few rounds at a time, more complex/difficult drills involve far more rounds, often requiring multiple magazines and multiple targets. These types of drills are generally aren't done at your basic indoor shooting galley ranges but even there there are plenty of ways to burn through a substantial amount of ammunition.

And while part of it is that in general shooting as a hobby is fun, another part is that some types of drills just require a lot of ammunition. ex: malfunction clearing drills where there are non-functional rounds mixed in to your magazines and you need to perform your drills with as little time loss compared to normal as possible. i.e. knowing how to react when things go wrong under pressure.

And so a single range day can easily put someone through tens of magazines which quickly gets into the hundreds of rounds. Then assuming you are going to the range weekly, biweekly, or monthly, that puts you into thousands or even tens of thousands of rounds per year.

As a recreational shooter, thousands of rounds is really not that much. I virtually never leave a range trip with fewer than a hundred rounds fired. And yes, for me, it's a combination of practice and fun ("plinking").

If ammunition didn't cost what it did, I'm sure I would shoot a lot more.

Practicing until it’s muscle memory. Progressing through increased distances, smaller targets, more challenging conditions. Particularly in long-range shooting, dialing in hand loaded round configurations for accuracy and consistency.

I think it’s possible for many shooters to achieve parts of a flow state when doing this. Imagine the satisfaction of throwing, catching, or hitting balls over and over in muscle memory, letting your mind and body work together to let your coordination and accuracy improve to solve the puzzle.

A thousand rounds is not that much. A standard box has 50 rounds, if you fire four boxes in a weekend, you can easily go through a thousand rounds over a month.

Now at $.25-.$30 / round, this does add up to an expensive hobby.

Imagine a driving range where a new ball was automatically teed up as soon as you hit the last one. It’d be really easy to keep hitting balls, trying to get the perfect most accurate shot, right? Then you’d want to hit three in a row, then five, then you realize you’ve been at the range for two hours and have spent way too much on ammo. That’s what recreational shooting is like.

It's fairly common advice that if you are carrying for self defense then you should be firing at least 100 to 200 rounds a month at the range to maintain your skill. That's not all that difficult to do; especially with a relatively high capacity handgun like most 9mm.

Like anything you want to become proficient at, you need consistent practice. How many free throws do you think LeBron has practiced? Now imagine you die if you miss. Also it’s fun to blast stuff.

i liberate a LOT of places