So I have that bad habit. Often the first shot is well aimed and not rushed. And if I can see the hole it is often pretty darn accurate. Inch from bullseye. It's the next round and the one after that, etc. that I rush. Like I'm in a hurry. Like the rest of the mag is spray-and-pray, suppressing fire, like a World War II movie.
Like each bullet isn't treated as the ONE bullet. The most important single shot I will ever fire.
And it should be.
I get too sloppy and impatient.
And what would happen in a critical life or death situation, where I am nervous and jittery, fighting down panic and the urge to flee? I'd be lucky if the first shot would be any good. And the rest of the magazine would follow that until I was empty. And I don't practice fast mag changes enough so that would be ALL the bullets shot to little effect in a worst case scenario.
Worst case. Even on bad days I still hit the target. Just not near the bull. Under stress, though, who knows.
Ok. How to fix?
Put the gun down after every shot for practice. That'll slow the rhythm. But don't always do that. You don't want to put the gun down in crisis, so break the practice up.
Get off my butt and check out IDPA competitions. You have to be accurate enough at IDPA, and you add the stress of competition to your shooting. It's not life or death stress, but it's still something.
Keep using Shoot N See type targets for immediate feedback with each shot, a target that spatters an easily seen contrasting color. I hate shooting and not knowing, well, did THAT shot do any good? How bout THAT one? With a target you can SEE the holes in you don't shoot a couple, bring the target back, look, send the target out, shoot a couple... And the range I shoot at isn't the best lit, so a target that splatters a contrasting color is very helpful. For the first few rounds. After that you lose individual shots in the clutter and can't pick em out.
Also, use more silhouette targets. You measure your skill by how close you get to the bulleseye, but if every hole is in the silhouette and none off, well every shot 'counted' didn't it? Some might not have ended the fight, but chances are the one before and after did. FULL SIZE silhouette. Half size and smaller are good to keep you on your toes and simulate targets at greater distances, so they have a place, but the full size is a confidence builder.
THEN I'll have to think about how to shoot obscured behind cover targets and moving targets.
And I may be getting too pessimistic. I'm not Breda accurate, but I am decent enough, and improving in small increments all the time.
I'm guilty of the same thing. But I'm getting better by only loading one round at a time. One round or eight, I still need to get a lot more range time!
ReplyDeleteBulls-eye vs silhouettes:
"In World War II we taught our soldiers to fire at bullseye targets, but that training failed miserably because we have no known instances of any soldiers being attacked by bullseyes. Now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view. That's the stimulus. The conditioned response is to shoot the target and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, repeated hundreds of times. Later, when they are in combat and somebody pops up with a gun, reflexively they will shoot and shoot to kill, 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of training (Grossman & Siddle, 1999)."
What I found myself doing was taking my focus off of the front sight to see where my first shot had hit. Then I had to refocus on the front sight to fire the second. If I was rapid firing, I never really got refocused on the front sight. And my results bore this out - all over the place. Try to stay focused on the front sight and worry about where the rounds hit after you've finished your string.
ReplyDeleteI shoot mostly silhouette targets, and am having the same problem. I should probably shoot a string and then evaluate, rather than evaluating each shot.
ReplyDeleteAs long as the shot is within the silhouette, especially at a "vital spot" (center mass or head), I consider it a success. It's when I get a stray shot outside of the silhouette that bothers me. Really bothers me. Because that means in real life I would have hit something/someone else.
Boy, I think you and I suffer from the same shooting problems.
ReplyDeleteI also wouldn't be surprised if I'm doing what Flashman describes above in his comment.