How good is good enough? Simple question with several answers, and theyre all dependent on your own personal goals. If your hobby is plinking, good enough might mean you can hit a soda bottle at 35 yards or a mossy spot on a stump at 50. If your goal is long range precision, it might be putting three bullets through the same hole at 250 yards. I started my trip to good enough with shooting the heads off of dandelions with a bb gun. It taught me a lot. If your goal is personal defense, the answer depends entirely on who youre talking to. If youre talking to someone that participates in league or association matches (IDPA, IPSC, etc), they will almost invariably say their particular sport will train you for defensive shooting the best, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. My personal preference is to train with a set target size regardless of distance and a little good natured competition rarely hurts the process. I prefer to keep my range time as practical, productive and cheap as possible. I use a lot of paper plates with the outline of a CD as a target with occasional sessions with anatomically correct or reactive targets and shooting from the draw as much as possible. I also like to use shot timers, but not every time. In training, accuracy shouldnt suffer to beat the clock, but the times should decrease as your proficiency improves. In one drill, my goal is to put two shots in the outline of the CD in as short a time as is practical while using specific movements. Heres an example. Starting from a sitting position as if I were having dinner in a restaurant, stand, draw, shoot twice on each of two targets with someone else telling me when to start. In another, from a standing position, draw and shoot while taking at least one step off the direct line with the target and moving towards the target starting at about 10 yards. These will teach you to react to possible real world situations using the same clothing and equipment you have and wear every day. While it seems that the times are biased against the heavier recoiling calibers like 10 millimeter or .357 magnum, if that is what you want to carry for defensive use, you have to realize that your opponents will not stand still while you recover from the recoil before taking their own evasive movements. While close quarters proficiency is vital, longer range accuracy is also a good way to test yourself. In a recent situation in Texas, a man made a shot with a 4 inch .357 magnum at well over 50 yards to stop a man with a rifle who was trying to murder a police officer. It was actually his third shot that hit the man in the head, but the other two were close enough to distract him. Work your way into these drills. Its not only counterproductive and a waste of money, it is unsafe and unnecessarily dangerous to bypass the crawling stages before trying to run a marathon. Even the most productive day at the range is a failure if someone gets hurt. If you shoot on steel targets, keep a safe distance from them and angle them to avoid having bullet fragments come back at you. The cheapest way Ive found to improve these times, and accuracy in general, has been dry fire practice. Its not possible to overly emphasize safety during dry fire practice. Always remove any source of ammunition from you and the area youre using and check your guns multiple times, both visually and physically before you conduct any dry fire practice. Ive also heard it said that there is no safe place for dry fire practice in apartments and hotel rooms. Never dry fire a rimfire gun. The firing pin on rimfires will hit the mouth of the chamber and damage the gun. There is also special ammunition available to cushion the firing pin to avoid damage and some of these have lasers to use with special targets that score your hits.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 16:31:40 +0000
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