Teach Yourself to Shoot Better

Have you seen those pistol correction targets on the internet? Apparently if you just look at them and your bullet holes, it will allow you to just go ahead and fix yourself. Seriously? Fix myself?  I thought even my Adventure Wife would have given up on that foolish hope some decades back, but no. Still rears it’s ugly visage at my house on a regular basis. I think I am fine and always have been …and turns out after being married for thirty years I find out I am still considered at my house to be a “work in progress” or a “fixer upper.”  My “trainable” quotient on most days vacillates between “faithful but smelly dog” and “slovenly disaffected teenager.” Who knew?

I can change, but at this age change is generally hard and usually unwelcome!

I do occasionally repeat the Zen adage first uttered by the great Canadian Philosopher and Male Advocate Statesman Red Green- “I’m a man. But I can change. I guess. If I have to…” I am still trying to change how well I can shoot a pistol. All that other stuff Adventure Wife goes on and on about and how I don’t listen- well I find shooting to be more worthy improvement goals for me personally. Well that, and I wasn’t really listening to the other stuff she keeps talking about. (I just read this first part to Adventure Wife and she said “You might actually be self aware!” then went back to complaining about stuff I do, or don’t do, have done, or may some day in the future not have done correctly…you know normal.)

I try to work on shooting ingredients on every trip to the pistol range.  I usually work on only one or two techniques per session. Going beyond one or two items tends to wash out the benefits of focusing on small pieces. I don’t “plink”. Ever. I am there to work.

I don’t go the range just to burn up some ammo like I used to before Covid, Election Issues, Monkey Pox, Ammo and Oil Shortages,  Lives Who Matter Riots….aw hell, pick your government inspired crisis- I just don’t like cutting into my stores without it being for a good purpose. Why I even heard through the grapevine on his most recent $16 Billion trick or treat pass through Wash D.C., the president of Ukraine was sniffing around  “Well what about Mike’s stockpile of ammo? Can we get some of that?”  No. Ni. Nein. Neg. Nyet. 

I’d be the first to affirm shooting is more fun if you share it with friends or family, but when I go alone, I am concentrating on techniques. I have a different mindset testing guns or groupings or myself. I am there to work ,and I don’t like distractions when I am trying to sort out what I am doing wrong or how to do it better. I would like to blame some bad targets or marksmanship results on the different guns I shoot, but learned long ago almost any modern gun off the shelf will shoot faster and more accurately than I can. So I don’t blame the tools.

Shooting on public access ranges can be a pain. They have tight safety rules which prevent lots of the good stuff like drawing from the holster (the Horror!) Shooting and moving (Yikes!) Shooting quickly (Oh no!) or even double taps (I swear this really happened- at a no double tap range I was confronted by a staffer who said shooting two times close together was actually a fire hazard! I never went back-probably didn’t want to catch fire.)

So accepting the limits of a public shooting range I still go to practice my fundamentals and marksmanship. No matter what other type of action/combat or competitive shooting I do, the basics remain the same and professionals practice the bullseye shooting basics until they are perfect instead of trying to believe in some advanced technique. This is akin to Bruce Lee saying “I fear not the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  (Geez, I’m just dripping wisdom all over this article aren’t I? You are so welcome!)

Caswell came out with analysis targets long ago, and you should be able to look at holes in your targets and try out some of the advice shown on their target…but most (OK ALL) targets I see at public shooting ranges don’t group large amounts of holes in just one area of the target. So using the analysis target doesn’t work all that well if you have holes all over the target. “Hmmm well I was heeling three times and too much finger or too little finger twice and thumbing four times and one hole in the upper corner where it says Handgun Target Guide.”  You can’t fix all of that at once. Look for an average of what is going on with your target and commit to some change there, and for goodness sake don’t start banging sights left and right until you have all of your bullets arriving consistently in groups there. Get the practice with a couple hundred rounds first before ever considering changing the sights. 

Look at your target. If it is a mess at short distances then work on fundamentals- trigger pull, grip, sights, breathing and stance. If it is a mess at long distances then practice more at long distance-and work on fundamentals! If you are good up close, then challenge yourself to go out further until you are not as good, then work on shooting at that distance in repeated sessions. I see public range shooters shooting Andre the Giant sized targets  with .45’s and .44 Mags  at 7 yards or less with shotgun like results, and shake my head. Stretch those guns out. Shoot at 25 and see how it goes. Teach yourself by looking at your targets and being honest. 

If you are shooting rifles like those pesky popular self loading types the Governor hates up close, well shame on you if you aren’t shooting them out as far as you can. Even your Great-Grandma can hit targets up close with one. (Well my Great-Grandma could. She kept a barnyard varmint free. Some things don’t change I am pretty serious about keeping my barnyard under control too, only the varmints have changed.)

Last year, I got a roll of 3 inch bullseye stickers from TEMU in China for about a nickel, or the mining rights for my back yard (there was a lot of small print, and I tend to lose focus) and I like to put several stickers on a regular sized target on the sides and corners. It does a couple of things for me. Now I have multiple aiming points and don’t have to swap out paper targets as often, and more importantly, I must focus on the smaller target. Aim small, miss small. Shooting center of mass on Wal-Mart Sized People paper targets are fine, but if I am not focused to a specific point of aim my groups can suffer. 

I taught federal agents to shoot for 25 years, and so many would come away from quarterly qualifications talking about how they usually do better or how they used to do better. I don’t have time for that. How you scored that day is a good as you are on that day if called upon to perform. Period. If you want better, you have to go out and focus and work at being better. If you think you are going to use your pistol to protect your life or the lives of others then you better be “real good” and not pretending you are “good enough.” Real life shooting scenarios have so many things going on which are not practiced on a range, it is impossible to rely on the idea you will magically get better if called upon in a stress filled, noisy and moving deadly force situation. Be serious with examining your own targets and work towards better marksmanship at every practice session.

I shoot at several indoor ranges near me, and am always amazed to see most shooters blazing away at about 10  to 20 feet and not hitting the bullseye- even with rifles! If you are shooting at 7 yards or less, there really is no reason you should not be hitting the bull each time-unless you screw up each shot! Using one eye or both eyes, one arm or two arms, Weaver or Triangle stance, holding your breath or not, left handed or right handed….hell even standing on one leg, or not using sights at all you should be able to hit the bullseye or target center up close. You have no time or stress constraints on you, and at that distance your sights are not even real critical to event! If you just cover the center with your front sight the bullet is pretty much going to fly straight- unless of course you screw up when you pull the trigger.

If you are grouping (yeah shooting bullets into a group is a real and not mythical thing…) and are hitting the bullseye up close then do yourself a favor and send that target further down range. Working at longer range will expose mistakes or inefficiencies in your technique which are not viewable up close.

Most days on the range I focus on my trigger press. Not trigger pull, jerk or yank. Trigger press. If the gun is pointed in the correct general direction and I press the trigger without disturbing the gun, I will hit what I am vaguely aiming at. The rudimentary sights on a pistol don’t have to be absolutely perfectly lined up at close range (say 15 yards or less.) Yet even a perfect sight picture won’t be worth a hoot if you yank the trigger and pull the shot wide of target. You can have everything else just right and ruin it with a bad trigger pull. On the target analysis chart the entire bottom half of the target are really trigger finger issues except for “breaking wrist too soon” which I find is usually a sight alignment issue looking over the top of the sights or dropping the front sight while looking to see where the bullet impacts. 

Trigger. Trigger. Trigger.  On 1911 style single action pistols you press the trigger straight back with the pad of your trigger finger. I got a Browning Hi-Power single action pistol this year and had to rework my brain and trigger finger to get that pad in place instead of stuffing more finger in like my Sigs and Glocks. On those guns I end up with the trigger centered in the crease of my trigger finger. 

Grip is the second item I look at if I have bad groups. I usually notice groups opening up late in a session or if I am not thinking my way through each shot and using more muscle memory of what feels good and I have to reestablish good grips.  Ideally my gun hand grips high up on the backstrap with a fairly easy grip (not loose, just comfy.) My support hand is really my “grip” providing  70 percent of the gripping strength on the gun. If my gun hand is gripped tight my fingers, especially my trigger finger doesn’t work right. Try it yourself- make tight fists with both hands and then try to make your index finger work smoothly- feel the tension and jerky movement. Then keep your support hand tight but your gun hand loose and that finger works like a champ! Way to go. Get yourself a participation trophy or a juice box. 

Good grip and dedicated follow through will also help negate a lot of recoil issues and help with follow up shots but only when the gun has settled back down from recoil.

You can see on the analysis charts squeezing or milking the grip with your other 9 fingers or whole hand while trying to squeeze off a natural shot will pull the impact to the right. “Thumbing” can be a combo of squeezing your trigger finger and thumb at the same time and again pulling things to the right. Go back to your grip wrap up- 30% strong hand on the gun and 70% with wrap up support hand and this will free up your index finger and prevent the thumb from clenching. 

In another session I might work on sight alignment or use of red dots. Most ranges won’t allow holster draw (Liability and Lawyers make all our lives better don’t they?) but you can bring an unholstered pistol from your waist level or bench level to your eye and squeeze off a shot when the sights align. I like to teach bringing the pistol out of the holster-ish area to meet your support hand about the center of the chest, establish the grip and extend straight out from your heart to the center of the target. You can shoot any time along the way the pistol is travelling towards the target and ideally when you reach full extension and have the sights centered start moving the trigger.

You are going to breath and move-everyone does it, and sometimes even heart beats can move a sight picture. It happens, and during some training sessions I will deliberately hold sight picture longer to get a feeling for how the gun moves and floats. If it is moving too much, I take a break and may have to work with coming to a natural exhale to be the steadiest point in the trigger sequence. 

There are lots of other little topics you can work on, but focus on the trigger press and grip should help you clean up your groups quicker than anything else. Go teach yourself… and keep your stick on the ice as HE says.