Mitch Gibson - Learning to be a shooter

[drmitchgibson]

They were off a single sand bag. I didn't spend too much time on it because I had a guest that's a noob to guns in general. Hits were all centered, but way high, about 14". I don't usually time my shots while breathing since I wouldn't be doing that at a match, but I did end up breaking shots at the respiratory pause and also after letting about 1/3 of the air out of my lungs. Nothing worked, so I figured my vertical zero is off or the wind did it. I thought it may be possible that the wind sweeping up the berm a foot below the trajectory of the bullets might do it, but I have no idea how reasonable that is.

 

[brandt9913]

If you zeroed your rifle with a heavier bullet than you were shooting Sunday, that would also account for the impact being higher than you expected.

 

[1000YRDSHOT]

Lets say you are shooting at 100 yards with a muzzle velocity of 3100 fps. It will take the bullet a tad less than 0.1 seconds to travel from the chamber to the target. It takes less that a half of a millisecond to travel the length of the barrel.

Now lets say you had a very strong wind acting on the bullet on a vertical axis/upward force the last ten feet before the target. Lets also say that the velocity decreased to 3000 fps due to drag (I don't know exactly how much velocity it loses at 100 yards, but it isn't much)

The force of that wind would be acting on the bullet for 0.00333 seconds before it struck the target.

Its just not possible for it to be off by that much due to that type wind scenario....it is still negligible movement.

As brandt9913 mentioned, were you shooting different ammo than what you zeroed with? Or have you removed your optic or sights?

As for breathing, even in a match....if you are shooting at distance with your rifle then you need to control you breathing, trigger pull, and get the best shooting position you are afforded!!

I have shot 3 gun and have always done well on long range when I follow the fundamentals and don't get in a hurry.
(you don't need to worry too much about breathing if you are shooting a torso size target at 100)



Food for thought.....

It will take your .223 @ 3100 fps approximately 0.3 seconds to hit a gong at 300 yards
It will take approximately 0.8 seconds for you to hear the sound of bullet striking the gong.......(I thought this might be helpful, because if you become a really good rifle shooter you are wasting that much time waiting to hear the strike instead of moving to the next target)

It will take you .308 @ 2600 fps approximately 0.35 seconds to hit that same gong at 300 yards
And of course it will take the same amount of time for you to hear the "PING"

 

[drmitchgibson]

Damn, this is great information. I just read it. Turns out I can't remember zeroing my scope at rifle distance, so I don't think I ever did it. I did roughly zero it at something like ten yards or so after I mounted it, but that was off-hand and informal, just screwing around, and I never went back out and zeroed at 50 yards with sandbags and a bench. Derp! Shot it today, and was mostly centered but guess what? About a foot high at 50 yards. It's all good now, though.
I shot the pistol at paper, but had a hard time concentrating. Had to adjust the sights a little bit more for elevation and windage, but my larger groups at 25 yards were about eight inches, terrible. It was also interestingly awful to switch between handguns, because the triggers are so different between 1911s/Glocks/Revolvers, and ended up shooting when I meant to prep a handful of times with the new pistol. Banner/North Canadian Ranges was a damn dangerous place to be shooting today, especially a pistol. But it is a place to shoot.

 

[dennishoddy]

Lets say you are shooting at 100 yards with a muzzle velocity of 3100 fps. It will take the bullet a tad less than 0.1 seconds to travel from the chamber to the target. It takes less that a half of a millisecond to travel the length of the barrel.

Now lets say you had a very strong wind acting on the bullet on a vertical axis/upward force the last ten feet before the target. Lets also say that the velocity decreased to 3000 fps due to drag (I don't know exactly how much velocity it loses at 100 yards, but it isn't much)

The force of that wind would be acting on the bullet for 0.00333 seconds before it struck the target.

Its just not possible for it to be off by that much due to that type wind scenario....it is still negligible movement.

As brandt9913 mentioned, were you shooting different ammo than what you zeroed with? Or have you removed your optic or sights?

As for breathing, even in a match....if you are shooting at distance with your rifle then you need to control you breathing, trigger pull, and get the best shooting position you are afforded!!

I have shot 3 gun and have always done well on long range when I follow the fundamentals and don't get in a hurry.
(you don't need to worry too much about breathing if you are shooting a torso size target at 100)



Food for thought.....

It will take your .223 @ 3100 fps approximately 0.3 seconds to hit a gong at 300 yards
It will take approximately 0.8 seconds for you to hear the sound of bullet striking the gong.......(I thought this might be helpful, because if you become a really good rifle shooter you are wasting that much time waiting to hear the strike instead of moving to the next target)

It will take you .308 @ 2600 fps approximately 0.35 seconds to hit that same gong at 300 yards
And of course it will take the same amount of time for you to hear the "PING"

Dammed good information!

 

[drmitchgibson]

Today I shot my first match with the new gun, at the USPSA match as USSA. I was not prepared for slide-lock reloads, had not practiced them at all, and ended up thumbing the slide release lever with my weak-hand thumb in a kind of dumb-founded desperation to drop the slide. It was not good, but fortunately it only happened a few times. I had to send three of the mags I ordered from Dawson to STI for warranty work, as all three had the follower binding up in the tube very severely, and were unusable. Fortunately I was able to get two good ones from Tony, but the mag that came with the gun was a 120mm mag, and that, coupled with only having three mags total, led to some unpleasant stage planning. Like having to shoot until slide-lock.

Otherwise it was a good match. I shot faster and more accurately than usual, and my non-slide-lock reloads were great, stage planning/running was great until the slide-lock debacles, but my sights were still zeroed too low, and I consistently shot a little low at the steel targets. My weak-hand shooting was terrible, and I plan to work heavily on that. I need to get much more familiar with running this new pistol at speed.

USSA is a great facility. GREAT! I wish we had something like it near or in OKC. Despite USSA's physical greatness, having a good match and finding things to work on, I'd rather have shot 3-Gun today.

 

[brandt9913]

I wish we had something like it near or in OKC. Despite USSA's physical greatness, having a good match and finding things to work on, I'd rather have shot 3-Gun today.

Uh. Besides the 360 bay, what exactly does USSA have that we don't have here? The OKCGC is pretty damn nice by most people's standards. Dues are less than 1/3rd USSA.

Grass is not always greener on the other side. Unless you want to pay 3 times more to shoot for practice.

 

[aeropb]

OKCGC is a great place but its not the same. USSA is up there with best I've ever heard of. If I ever move to Tulsa I'm becoming a member there the exact same day.

 

[ryanncass]

Uh. Besides the 360 bay, what exactly does USSA have that we don't have here? The OKCGC is pretty damn nice by most people's standards. Dues are less than 1/3rd USSA.

Grass is not always greener on the other side. Unless you want to pay 3 times more to shoot for practice.

I have never seen OKCGC shoot house or Rogers range, Steel challenge is always set up, Training group every wednesday with Mike just to name a few.

 

[mike cyrwus]

STI tubes?? Warranty work?? Hahaha!
Thats called mag tuning, boy! Better get used to it!

 

[1000YRDSHOT]

I have never seen OKCGC shoot house or Rogers range, Steel challenge is always set up, Training group every wednesday with Mike just to name a few.

The shoot house is very nice, and you have a very nice/well kept facility. I don't remember seeing any ranges past 300, but you may have one that I didn't see. I also don't remember any skeet or trap fields.

 

[The Antichrome]

The shoot house is very nice, and you have a very nice/well kept facility. I don't remember seeing any ranges past 300, but you may have one that I didn't see. I also don't remember any skeet or trap fields.

While there are no skeet/trap/sporting clays fields...there is a 300 yd range.
OKCGC is fantastic range and club, no doubt. USSA is a full service shooting academy.
The comparison is apples/oranges, both are good and good for you.

Now, lets drop the OKCGC vs. USSA stuff and let Mitch have his training log back.

 

[drmitchgibson]

STI tubes?? Warranty work?? Hahaha!
Thats called mag tuning, boy! Better get used to it!

No elephant dung, right? Too bad quality control didn't occur. I thought about getting the tuning kit but I need to stop spending on this setup until next year, and STI will fix the mags for free. Also, your ejector-fitting statement comes to mind; the one on this gun is probably depth-seated according to caliber using a one-size-fits-all generic part. If I do any other spending this year it will be a 18" or 20" AR barrel and an adjustable gas block.

And to everyone else, I just meant it would be nice to have an outdoor range with a large number of very large and closely spaced bays. The layout of USSA is fantastic, unusually well thought out. Some of the stages we ran simply wouldn't fit at OKCGC. They're two different animals anyway.

 

[drmitchgibson]

I haven't been dry-firing much this year, and I'm not sure I will until the fall. My pistol shooting has made serious progress, especially when I follow-through and look the shot off. When I do that, I can't miss. Shooting 3-Gun last weekend was great, probably the most excited I've been with my clothes on. My shotgun shooting could have been more controlled but not any better. The sight picture at speed was really weird, and I only missed when I shot without my sights on target. Which sounds stupid, but it had everything to do with going fast and very little to do with aiming, except on the last stage when it also had something to do with a par time. Otherwise it was good shooting, and right now my shotgun is my favorite gun. My rifle shooting was OK, but I was so excited I didn't notice the scope was on 4X magnification until the last stage, and I shot three no-shoots right in the head because it threw off my hold-over. Hostages are over-rated.

All through June the plan will be to practice weak-hand loading, and when I go to the range I'll be shotgunning as much as possible, in prep for the High Plains match. Right now I weak-hand load at about the rate of "****ing slow", and have lost a lot of ground since I quit practicing in the winter. This perishable skill thing sucks, but it also provides incentive to do a lot of shooting.

 

[drmitchgibson]

The last couple of weeks I have been practicing weak-hand loading for High Plains, 10 to 40 minutes per day. The first week kind of sucked. There was a lot of improvement in speed, but I just went from about really slow to kind of slow. I was putting four shells in the gun in eight seconds, sometimes dropping one or two. Now I'm getting eight in the gun in eight seconds on a good run, and a little bit faster than that on two occasions, but I'm not sure how much faster since I'm using par time.

What helped most was watching one of Jesse's videos from Feb. 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGy0Yy_DtkE&feature=plcp , and then the "World's fastest" thing where he talks about indexing on the caddie with the ring finger. This also helped me fix my index depth-wise so that I'm picking up four shells almost every time, instead of three. The four-shell caddie really seems like a good easy fix for that kind of thing, but I'm not changing my gear until next year at the earliest.

The unmodified loading port has been irritating me, but I'm going to wait until after the match to open it up, since that would eat into my weak-hand practice.

In a theoretical way, it seems a bit shitty to be working on this when the load-two systems are making a strong showing, functionally, but there's no point in limiting myself by not learning to weak-hand load quickly, as it's a very good technique.

 

[KurtM]

Weakhand loading is sooooo last week. All the top shooters are going to the quad system. It is never too early to change.

 

[benjamin-benjamin]

Weakhand loading is sooooo last week. All the top shooters are going to the quad system. It is never too early to change.

is this sarcasm?? (i'm seriously asking, i am assuming it is)

 

[KurtM]

Sounds like a question for the Semi-Pros :superman:

 

[Chambers]

Does the pope elephant dung in the woods?

 

[jtischauser]

The last couple of weeks I have been practicing weak-hand loading for High Plains, 10 to 40 minutes per day. The first week kind of sucked. There was a lot of improvement in speed, but I just went from about really slow to kind of slow. I was putting four shells in the gun in eight seconds, sometimes dropping one or two. Now I'm getting eight in the gun in eight seconds on a good run, and a little bit faster than that on two occasions, but I'm not sure how much faster since I'm using par time.

What helped most was watching one of Jesse's videos from Feb. 2011, , and then the "World's fastest" thing where he talks about indexing on the caddie with the ring finger. This also helped me fix my index depth-wise so that I'm picking up four shells almost every time, instead of three. The four-shell caddie really seems like a good easy fix for that kind of thing, but I'm not changing my gear until next year at the earliest.

The unmodified loading port has been irritating me, but I'm going to wait until after the match to open it up, since that would eat into my weak-hand practice.

In a theoretical way, it seems a bit shitty to be working on this when the load-two systems are making a strong showing, functionally, but there's no point in limiting myself by not learning to weak-hand load quickly, as it's a very good technique.

My thumb comes out of the loading port and off of the lifter a few times in that video. That is a no no.