Excerpted from April 2008 Newsletter
You may know that I’ve become addicted to air rifles now. It’s a good thing that I didn’t discover these things before I discovered highpower, or I’d never have made it to this game.
But air rifles are something else. They and their ammunition are relatively cheap, you can shoot them in your house or garage, and you can shoot hundreds of rounds a day or week with little noticeable impact on your wallet, shoulder, or marriage.
For the past two years I have been using a Daisy 853 to practice my standing position in the basement using the 5 Meter BB Gun Target at about 43 feet (the maximum distance in my basement, corner to corner). At that distance, the BB gun target looks just like our targets do at 100 yards. I put on my coat and do everything as if I am shooting in a match. It has helped me quite a bit. I also bought a Daisy 888 CO2 rifle and a Walther LGR (the first single stroke pneumatic rifle to win the Olympic gold). Some of you saw at the clinic how I converted a Daisy 888 to a virtual AR-15 air rifle–man is that thing fun to shoot!
This winter a few of us have started a different game. We shoot at animal silhouettes at 10 yards, without a shooting coat. Shooting without a coat takes away the main crutch that we lean on in the standing position. For a while you feel absolutely naked, and the gun muzzle seems to wobble from New York to San Francisco. But ever so gradually you start to learn how to keep the muzzle steady, how to squeeze the trigger, and how to make both coincide with the correct sight picture. It is the best learning experience I have ever seen for offhand shooting.
The advantages are twofold, first, as I said, you learn to shoot without any aids such as a coat. When you finally do put on the coat, it feels like you rested the rifle on a bench! This has got to help. Also, shooting at a silhouette takes some of the fussiness out of the game. If you just barely graze the animal, it’s a hit (in our game). We don’t worry about scoring rings, just whether or not we hit it. This is so much easier on your mind that you can’t believe it. The basic thought process is: just hit the black. That same thought process transfers easily into our highpower game–if you can hit black every time, you will have a good score.
Frankly folks, I thought I had topped out as a shooter last year. As I age, it is unlikely that my rapid fire or 600 yard scores will go anyplace but lower, and my standing scores have never been very good no matter how much I work on them. As I said, 2 years of work with the air rifle helped some, but I still make very stupid mistakes shooting offhand in the big matches, and with age creeping up, it’s hard to be too hopeful about the future. Mental mistakes will kill you, and you are starting to decline physically, it looks grim. Until now.
To begin with, shooting without the coat was sheer terror. My mind was screaming either “don’t shoot now” or “yank the trigger; hurry, hurry, hurry.” There wasn’t much in between. The muzzle wobble is so fast and so extreme you wonder how anyone ever hit anything standing up (and I still can’t shoot using a scope standing for these same reasons). The only solution to your howling anxiety is to return to the basics: establish a good position, acquire the sight picture, accept your wobble area, focus on the front sight, and squeeze the trigger without disturbing the sights. Each one of these steps took me weeks to refine this winter. I didn’t work on them scientifically or in the order I write about them here. Rather, as I became more and more agitated with myself for missing targets, I kept trying to figure out what to do better. Sometimes I’d try this, sometimes that, sometimes another thing. But one by one I “discovered” the things I needed to do to make things work out. Of course, the things I discovered are the simple basics of offhand shooting.
The very first thing you learn is to accept your wobble area. The only other alternative is to shoot skeet, which is to say to yank the trigger as the animal goes wobbling by. This doesn’t work, and I’ve proven that hundreds of times this winter. Accepting your wobble area does not mean to just put the rifle up and pull the trigger. Rather it means trying your best to hold the sight picture on target while you pull the trigger, knowing that there will be some oscillation, and if the wobble is too great you hold up your trigger pull. It’s easy to write and hard to do. Many, many times the trigger breaks just as you decide to hold up, and the shot goes way off. Tough. You learn to hold tighter and you learn trigger control. Les Welch has learned to shoot quickly. I have learned to shoot slowly. Different strokes for different folks.
Establishing a good position took weeks. Without a coat I couldn’t anchor the rifle in the nice rubber pads, and it kept slipping. My head kept finding different places on the stock, and it was a mess. Little by little I “discovered” ways to make myself more comfortable with less tension on my body so that I could hold the rifle on target for longer periods of time, thus allowing refinement of sight picture and wobble as well as a better, smoother trigger pull.
Trigger pull quickly showed itself to be a problem. I zeroed my rifle from the bench and then noticed in the offhand that a lot of shots I called good were off to one side or the other. This can only be trigger pull. I’m pretty good at calling my shot from the impression I get of the sight picture just as the shot breaks. When a shot is off my call it means either that it’s a malfunctioning gun or ammo (extremely rare) or I have executed something incorrectly. Usually it is the trigger pull disturbing the sights. In a couple of nights I changed my trigger finger orientation, and now I have a much smoother pull with fewer off-call shots. For this alone I am grateful to the air rifle. I would never have discovered my “new” trigger pull without it.
Finally, something we all struggle with but never admit is that we cheat on our sight picture. By that I mean that we look at the target rather than the front sight. We don’t intend to, but it happens. Well, once you can shoot 40-50 shots a night, 7 nights a week, you start to see all these little mistakes, and it became clear to me that many of my bad shots were because I was focusing on the target, not the front sight post. You simply cannot believe how much better I shoot when I make a concerted effort to focus on the front sight. We all say it, we teach it, and we believe it to be true. But it amazed me how much my eyes and brain wanted to cheat.
In a nutshell, shooting a lot of air rifle without a coat develops a certain calmness in your mind, and that calmness is necessary for you to execute all the steps necessary to a good offhand shot. Anxiety and pressure lead to bad shots, whereas relaxation and focus lead to good shots. Many experienced shooters refer to the standing position as “awfulhand” rather than offhand. More-experienced shooters caution never to refer to your shooting in a negative fashion because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in your head. The standing position is about 90 percent mental concentration, and the air rifle allows you to develop and practice that concentration. With thousands or rounds of practice you learn to put all that self-doubt and indecisiveness aside, because with a few months you can shoot as many rounds as in 10 years of center-fire shooting. That builds tremendous confidence; practice makes perfect.
This winter I’ve shot over 5,000 pellets. It’s all been fun (much more fun than dry firing), and it’s all been an education. For the first time ever I am just champing at the bit to get to a big match and shoot offhand.
What a difference an air rifle can make. If you want to improve, get an air rifle and shoot it.
Any questions?? Contact… Bill Corcoran (417) 862-861 or send me an email
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