Mitch Gibson - Learning to be a shooter

SpaceFlunky

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Kind of a disturbing experience today: I put some new sights on a friend's M&P 9 Pro, and had an unpleasant time pulling the trigger while sighting it in. It would seem my triggering is rapidly being spoiled by Dawson's trigger work on my 2011. I may have to get a plastic gun just to keep in practice with the long sear engagement.
Kind of a disturbing experience today: I put some new sights on a friend's M&P 9 Pro, and had an unpleasant time pulling the trigger while sighting it in. It would seem my triggering is rapidly being spoiled by Dawson's trigger work on my 2011. I may have to get a plastic gun just to keep in practice with the long sear engagement.

haha, I need a damn trigger job on that gun! Your STI tho....goddamn son that **** has a smooth, crisp breaking trigger and great action on the slide. Im jelly all over it.
 

drmitchgibson

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Today after testing my new .223 loads I spent a small amount of time shooting at clays with my shotgun. I wasn't sure I'd be able to throw clays (using a handheld thrower) and then shoot them, but it ended up being pretty easy, and a ton of fun. Clays are so incredibly cheap! It's awesome. Hitting the clays activated by poppers during 3-Gun has been incredibly difficult to just pick up, having no prior experience doing such a thing. I think this will become a permanent part of the training.
 

The Antichrome

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Remember my standing offer in regard to Sporting Clays: Any BS'er is welcome to join me for a round at the Pajaro Shotgun club here in Ft Smith. The guest fee is pretty cheap, its a fun club with a great S/C course.

Once we get daylight hours back, it'd be really fun to shoot a round after the Old Fort USPSA match.
 

drmitchgibson

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I recently put a new-to-me Kies adjustable gas block on my rifle, with the help of Tony Wall. The gas port was drilled through the wrong pilot hole/mounting hole, a manufacturing defect, but I'm the kind of person that can fix such things. I also installed a locking set screw so that the gas setting will remain stable. Shot it a couple times this week, and it's a very nice thing to have. It would be better with a lower-mass carrier group, but it does make shooting noticeably less violent.

The good thing here is that it allows me more focus on the shooting at longer ranges. My sight picture isn't being quite so jacked up by the recoil, even though watching the gas jets from the compensator presents some distortion. I was able to spend more time observing and improving my shooting at 300 yards than ever before.

It turns out that the first line on my reticle below the center dot is equivalent to a 300 yard zero when the center dot is zeroed at 200 yards with XM193-ish ammo. Very nice.
 

drmitchgibson

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I got some money. I need to buy some new pants. What I got is a new toolhead for my press, two pounds of rifle gunpowder, and 5000 primers. I narrowly avoided buying a bunch of **** from Wall, which I can wait for until the spring, or at least the middle of winter. Gotta be realistic, and what I really need to be doing is the shooting.

The making of the .223 is coming along very well. The process isn't bad once I got through the differences between loading for rifle versus pistol, some of which are hard to reconcile for a while. My Lee Reloader single-stage press broke a few days ago. It sounded like a .22lr being fired very close by. The head of the press where the die threads in ripped right off of the press body, and the foot of the press split almost halfway from the front to the back. I was pushing a piece of nickel-plated brass into the die when that happened. In fact, all three of the times I've run a plated brass case into the resize die it has resulted in a severely stuck case. It looks like Lee will send me a new press, which will now only be used to debulge .40S&W brass.
 

drmitchgibson

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I made up a pistol stage today, and then shot some clays. The stage was pretty brief, five targets from 7 yards to 25 yards with one movement of 10 yards. At first the shooting was too fast, and the hits were generally no good. I couldn't feel the timing. It felt like 7 second runs were 10 second runs, and statically engaging three of the targets in 4 seconds felt like 7 or 8 seconds. The cold and wind were a non-existent experience while shooting, but while taping and reloading it was somewhat miserable. Mag changes were great, and shooting groups went as well as can be expected, 4" at 25 yards this time. Focusing on the front sight while shooting at speed was tough initially, and I'm not sure if it was because of a cold start or cold and very windy weather.
Shooting clays went really well, and using a hand-held thrower as a one man operation is very easy to do well. Only problem was starting with the gun on safe a handful of times and forgetting to turn the safety off. I tried to throw some by hand in a sort of high arc like that which clays take off of the flippers in 3-Gun, but couldn't do it with my jacket on and a shotgun in one hand. I need to shoot some matches.
 

drmitchgibson

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For a long time I had been experiencing the front sight sitting much higher than the rear in my natural point of aim, either at the end of my draw and extension or after recoil, and had to constantly adjust for that. The last time I practiced pistol I changed my index so that I was shooting from a higher angle, and it is wildly successful. All I did was move the back of the gun up higher, and I'm not sure if this isn't just adapting to the difference in grip angle between the Glock and the 2011.

Today I shot my best points to date in USPSA, but it was a weird experience. I planned relatively few of my shooting positions, none of my mag changes, but my stage management was pretty fluid and my accuracy was very good. I was very relaxed and for some reason not very focused, but I think that if I were really concentrating my stage times would have been great.

Got some Man Mountain shell caddies, and they are wonderful. Weak-hand practice is going well, but I had some issues with the shell catch, so hopefully next time around things will be smooooooth.

All the cheaper .223 projectiles at Midway recently went from "In stock" to "Out of stock, no backorder". I'm not sure if this is going to affect me, but it's pretty irritating to my life as a shooter.
 

drmitchgibson

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I've shot three pistol matches this month, and got 89.5%, 92.1%, and 81.4% of stage points, respectively. I almost couldn't believe the number of alphas I was shooting at the first two. At Ponca I did one mag change so well that I stopped shooting for 1/2 a sec and just sort of stared at my gun, relishing the moment. Mag changes are one thing that I've had a hard time mentally reconciling, because I haven't made any dummy rounds to fill the mags with while practicing. Practicing with empty mags makes it easy to go extremely fast, and the feeling with full mags during a match is very different. I suppose if I don't buy FMJ or plated bullets for this year's shooting that I'll buy at least a hundred of them just to make dummy rounds for mag change practice.

It seems like my skill set is developed enough that I should start dry-firing again with my pistol. It takes a good handful of draws now to get the first shot off in under a second, and I need to bring that back down, and get serious about being competitive. Maybe aim a little bit.
 

dennishoddy

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Mitch, you need to get somebody to load you up some rounds minus the powder, and primer if you don't reload yourself. The weight would be almost the same.
 

drmitchgibson

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I've been working on a lot of shooting activities simultaneously for several months, and haven't really focused on one thing in particular.

Pistol- not as much range time as I'd like. Not in terms of volume so much as frequency, although I prefer to shoot >400 rounds when I practice. It's no longer frustrating dealing with this as a perishable skill, but some of my runs are pretty disappointing when practice starts. There is a large difference in doing this slow-fire and at speed, as my ability to shoot accurately without being timed only seems to improve. I picked up a dry-fire book by Steve Anderson just to use for building a program to adhere to, but am not sure when I'll start dry-fire again. Feels like it will be soon. I've only dry-fire practiced maybe 10 times in the last year. As I transition to more of an early-morning person, I plan to do it every morning. I've been irritated with my 2011 mags and slide-locking. For now, I like my gun to lock the slide back when the magazine is empty. My mags feed fine and don't need feed-lip adjustment, but with Gram's and Arredondo followers (which allow me to put 20 rounds in the mag) they activate the slide-lock with one round still in the mag. I went back to the STI followers until I decide whether to keep dealing with what I think is a completely retarded issue. I haven't measured and re-dimensioned my mag bodies yet, so maybe that will yield something positive.

Rifle- my handloads are doing very well, although I was hesitant about running them at high speed until I went through a few score. Even though it's been on the rifle a long time, I've found that my compensator is really just incredibly, offensively loud. I think it's louder with the adjustable gas block, since more gas is coming out the front. Doubling up on ear-pro is something I do every time I shoot the AR now; otherwise my ears ring. I put a fixed stock on the rifle a few months ago, which I like a lot better than the adjustable mil-spec carbine thing it had before. When I was re-positioning my LaRue mount after installing the new stock, one of the VFZ mounts stripped out. They fixed it for free, but I had to send in the whole upper, and after paying for shipping both ways, I've got as much in that mount as I would have if I'd just bought the QD mount. Lame. I'm finding that shooting at steel at 100 yards is boring unless I do it off-hand or as fast as possible, but shooting at 200 and 300 is still interesting, as well as shooting at any distance at the Benchrest area. I got one of JoeBobOutfitters AR trigger adjusters for a stocking stuffer for myself at Xmas, but didn't install it until Feb/March. It seemed pretty mediocre until I shot with it, as it makes the trigger pull heavier, but it really shined on the range. It offers a much shorter pull, and works by taking the most of the slack out of the trigger. My longer-range shooting improved drastically, and I do not notice the trigger pull being heavier during live-fire. Pretty great deal at $18. I'll probably stick with it for now.

Shotgun- has become my favorite gun to shoot. I've taken to shooting clays with a hand-held thrower almost every time I go to the range. About a month ago I got a quad-loading system, and it certainly is far faster than weak-hand loading, but it's not as convenient for loading in general. At the Nordic match in Sparta, I weak-hand loaded a lot more than I used the quad-loaders, due to the ability to load a controlled number of shells for whatever circumstances dictated. Most of the people I shot with and saw shooting were using a load-two type of setup, and it was far more convenient than the quad-load setup. More options, just as fast. I'm going to get one, just not sure whose product. I also ended up putting my Matchsaver back on and used it to great effect several times. Of note, my shotgun was the only one on my squad without any non-operator-error stoppages, but by day two they were all mostly running well. On three or four occasions I port-loaded and hit the bolt release before the shell was fully inside the gun. The Saigas had consistent issues, but that wasn't surprising. We did have one of the newer Stoeger inertia-driven guns on our squad, and it ran pretty well, just had some lifter issues. Lifter issues and mag-tube spring issues seemed to be the most common. The most important thing I came away with was the desire to start shooting skeet. Hitting things on the fly is definitely an area I need to focus on, and I get the feeling it will improve my overall shooting in general, not just with a shotgun.
 

drmitchgibson

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For a long time I'd been under the impression that looking through my pistol sights was a good idea. It is not a good idea. I've been focusing on the front sight as much as I can lately, as opposed to focusing on my sight picture in general. My groups are more consistent and tighter, and I can hit the 100 yard steel >=14 times out of each 20 shots, depending on how long I've been holding my gun up. Sometimes I hold the gun up for quite a while a get a pretty shaky sight picture. I also noticed a lot more consistency when placing my finger pad evenly across the face of the trigger and pulling as straight back as possible. This mainly makes a difference at long range or when shooting groups at the upper A zone.

I shot a lot of clays today, thrown with a handheld thrower, and had an interesting experience in that sometimes I absolutely knew I was going to dust the clay. I could feel it from the moment when I mounted the gun. Throwing clays across my field of view, to any degree, by myself proved to be nearly impossible and a waste of time. I'll have to resort to machines for that. I did learn a lot about where to hold to dust the clays, but there were enough variables, such as in mounting the gun poorly or whether or not the safety was on, that threw me off on some ridiculously easy shots. I'd been switching the safety on after every clay, and off before mounting and shooting. Sometimes I left he safety off and it just completely ****ed up my routine. Using the safety a lot was just to get more used to using the safety regularly, something I really only have done routinely with my pistol. I also found that I probably could be shouldering the shotgun higher that I normally do, and it feels good enough that I'll practice and probably change how I mount the shotgun in the future.

These guns haven't been cleaned or oiled in about 1000 rounds, and are running well, but I will be cleaning them sometime this week in preparation for dryfire.
 
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Mitch Gibson said:
For a long time I'd been under the impression that looking through my pistol sights was a good idea. It is not a good idea.
you should only look through your rear sight. What you focus on depends where you are in the trigger cycle
 

drmitchgibson

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I've been focusing on the target at the wrong time during shots that require a clear front sight.

I forgot to mention throwing clays into the air and shooting them. It was pretty unsuccessful, and made Tom Knapp seem like more of a giant.
 

drmitchgibson

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Shotgun-
I've been holding back on shooting fast, but I'm going to stop doing that. Most of the time I'm not doing any not-aiming bullshit, and at the Pro-Am last week I was able to put some heat on my runs when the gun was not having FTEs. Cleaning it fixed that issue, but I also did not try using the same Estate shotshells. It seems like the rim on them is more rounded, and I don't trust them yet. That being said, my gun eats Winchester Universal all day long since I ported the chamber. This week I put a +9 tube on the gun, so I can have 12 in the mag tube. Should be good for loading on the move and having a lot of shells on hand. It's still easier to just not miss than load fast, and that will always be true.

Rifle-
The adjustable gas on the gun closed up between stages today and turned my gun into a single-shot. Probably going to put the low-profile non-adjustable gas block back on, or make a new set screw to jam the other in place. We'll see. Don't need that single-shot **** happening ever again. I was having a great stage run and it turned right to dogshit because of the gas block.

Pistol-
Replaced the Dawson ICE magwell with the stock STI unit. Then took off the STI. I don't feel I have any use for a magwell at this point, and I like the slimness of the gun without it. I have also felt for a while that switching to a 2011 is something I did way too soon, and have been thinking of selling/trading to get a Glock and a single-stack, and playing two divisions instead of one. Prob will hold off on that for a while, and just keep building my skill with the current gun.

3-Gun today was wicked awesome. I've been having a lot more fun than ever before at matches, and I'm not sure what all rolls into that.
 

drmitchgibson

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So it seems normal, maybe, but I tend to have a trajectory of dramatic performance improvement throughout the course of a match. I don't consume any energy drinks to boost my ability to perform cold, and don't really see myself ever doing that, so it's probably time to institute a dry-fire regime again. It seems like doing some shooting before a match would also help, but that seems like cheating.

During live-fire practice I've moved to setting up a stage with walls and multiple shooting positions, where before I've essentially done small variations on more of a stand-and-fire theme. I have not really focused on coming up with a well-thought-out stage plan at any point during a match, ever. I tend to accept an idea of what I will do once the timer beeps, and then improvise, but it's time to really start planning my shooting out to see what I can come with. I'm just not spending enough time figuring out ways to shoot a stage efficiently on stages that have multiple good options. Seems like I spend a LOT of time scoring and ROing, and trying to keep things moving along. Maybe a period of less volunteering is in order.

During practice I notice myself doing things that I am not aware of during a match. Two things, but they are fundamentals. Sometimes I catch myself not gripping well with my support hand, and I also have been slapping the trigger. I think having a 1911-trigger is making me slack in adhering rigidly to good trigger management. It's becoming more desirable to sell off the 2011 and pick up a gun that forces trigger management, but I also don't want to make any changes that slow down my progress. I made B-Class recently. In any case, next spring I plan on going to TDSA ACP1 for a second time, just to get some really serious practice doing things the right way.
 

drmitchgibson

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Pistol- hardly throwing any shots lately. Last match I finished higher than ever (4 of 58 overall), shot clean, no penalties. The triggering was great, stage plans were good, just me and my sights, driving the gun. Probably need to start dryfire practice to pick up some speed that didn't matter for a year. Maybe do some fast live-fire drills too, just to push the limits.

Rifle- much more interested in shooting the rifle lately. Tried shooting out to 500 yards at the round steel gongs, but cut it short because even at 300 yards I couldn't hear the impacts for feedback and was too distracted to call hits visually. Could also have been hampered by the doubled-up ear pro. Went to Benchrest and fired at paper at 200 yards, and spent 50 rounds shooting groups, re-confirming zero, and experiencing the triggering. I'm not sure I can relate what I learned from the trigger today, but it has to do with not rushing. My last three shots made a 1/2" group that I should have taken a picture of. But I have a dumb-phone, so it will have to be a memory. Even though three shots isn't really a real group, it was still gratifying. I'm taking off a ton of time this month, and may spend most of it shooting my rifle. Overall, not too pleased with my trigger pull weight, but I have to wait until after xmas to open the gift to change that, among other things.

Shotgun- nothing really happening. I shot my Rock Island M5 at clays a bit, and it was much tougher to get a bead on the clay bird than with the SBE. I assume it's because I shoot the SBE a lot, and the M5 just sits around waiting for bad guys. Once I give in and start dryfiring I'll start practicing loading the shotgun. A few months ago I adjusted one of my quad-load caddies to sit on the weak-hand side, and I think it may be best for me to weak-hand quad-load. Not sure how all this quad-loading **** is going to pan out, as the shell-holders/caddies are pretty bulky and take up a lot of belt space. Maybe it will all tie right back in to NOT MISSING.
 

drmitchgibson

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Hit the 400 meter gong repeatedly today, but didn't have time to work on 500 meters. It was rewarding. Initially I saw the rounds hitting off-target to the right, and adjusted my windage turret to make up for that. Probably a bad idea, since I zeroed with great success yesterday, but I'm still new enough to shooting at such a degree of accuracy that I second-guessed yesterday's work and adjusted. In retrospect that was stupid.

I only wore one set of hearing protection, yet still hearing the impact was a bit tough, and I'm not sure how well that will work out at 500 meters. Andrei, the local Military Bolt Action champion, showed up and spotted for me, which was incredibly helpful. It's tough to understand and process everything I'm seeing at 4X power at these ranges. Dealing with the mil-spec trigger today was not so irritating as it was yesterday. Maybe I'm learning to trigger this thing correctly.
 

drmitchgibson

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Pistol- still throwing some shots, but mostly running stages is smooth and the plans are excellent. Need to work on follow-through. There aren't any shots I can't make anymore. I feel like when I rush through a stage that my performance is better, like I'm more visually focused Participated in a shoot-off for the first time at USSA a couple weeks ago, and it was very exciting. I did very poorly. After I started shooting I became confounded by the constant shooting next to me and could not concentrate. I would like to do more shoot-offs.

Rifle- screwed around with slinging the rifle in prep for the Pawnee Run 'N Gun. It was awkward and disappointing. I had to order more hardware to raise the mounting point on my buttstock. A couple weeks ago I was able be a spotter and be spotted for to find my hold for 500 meters. It was surprisingly easy with direct feedback. I am hoping to get some heavier projectiles soon, but will go ahead and use 55gr in the Run 'N Gun. It's all I have and all I've ever shot so far. Today I chrono'ed my rifle and carbine, and was disappointed in how close the readings were. 2910fps and 3050fps, 16" and 20" respectively. Might have to bump up the charge next go-round. Tried out the Aimpoint, and it was way fun. I zeroed it 2" low at 30 yards because I was in a short bay and running out of daylight. Planned to have all-day range time tomorrow, but the temp will be very low by 8AM. Looks like targets will be hung for dryfire.

No shotgun news to speak of.
 
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