Thread: Some reasons why it often goes bad.

Here is my normal shooting practice.

I always live on a farm, deliberately, as I don't like ranges. I like to shoot every day if I can. 200 rounds of 22LR and maybe 20-200 rounds of centerfire, depending on the rifle weekly, in an ideal world. At the moment I have a wee baby and not heaps of spare case, so its 100 rounds a week of factory .223
22LR gets shot out to 130m and I am very dissapointed if I miss at that range and with my Anschutz it is very rare. I actually can't remember the last time I missed with that rifle. I don't claim credit for it, it is a freak of a rifle, though it has a secret and I believe it is what @Cordite alluded to earlier. Lock time. It has taught me groups are such a tiny part of the story. It groups well, but so do others and none of them are killing machines like this rifle.

I shoot all over the property and I am lucky enough to have more than one farm to shoot, with ranges to 1200m. In the past I was all about those >1000m targets, but that was a while ago now. I have cliffs to shoot up and down etc etc and plenty of elevation. My current range is just divine. A flat plateau with a cliff at one end and two big gullies up either side.

For 17 years I have been using full blown centerfires rabbit shooting regularly. I will take any of my normally aspirated 7mm rem mag, or my 45-70 and go shoot rabbits. You will not see enough large game in a dozen life times to learn to shoot in the field, so you hunt rabbits.

I took up varminting and became obsessed with it. I abandoned my "flat shooting" rifles as being too wind effected and switched to a <.1Mill Sako 6.5x47L that Robbie Tiffen built me, may he rest in peace. I had to beg, the particular sticking point being bedding. That rifle shot <.1Mill all day every day. I used to shoot 7mm dots and it would keep the hole inside the dot, all day every day. Eventually, as my range was behind my house I went out for two weeks, fired one round, went home. 14 dots murdered. First shot cold bore accuracy, tested. I lost this rifle in a divorce. It does not bear thinking about. This whole thread makes me sad because of that. Robbie is dead, so he can't build me another and as I said, I don't know or trust anyone else.

It had a Schmidt and Bender PM2 on top and shot a lot of steel and hundreds of rabbits, all over 350m because I would set up that distance deliberately. Past 350m with a supressed rifle, you don't disturb them and it is a very productive way to shoot rabbits.

Currently I have all my rifles with traditional zeroes and if you spend a lot of time shooting at fixed targets, you know the drop for everything to 400m. I limit myself to 350m because this is the range I can kill a rabbit to. I can shoot to 350m with my .270 and my 7mm rem mag without great difficulty in odd ball conditions because PRACTICE.

Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You need to simulate what you are actually doing. Range shooting is essential to learn trigger pull etc, but it is very poor practice for field shooting.

The actual activity is not the same. While as stated by everyone, consistency is the key to successful range shooting, field shooting is a different animal.

In the field things must align, and you must have the most impeccable timing. This is where lock time comes in. You can't learn this on the internet. I could teach someone to shoot "sub moa" in about an hour with a rifle that does it, from scratch.

How much time is wasted on seeking more precision than you need? Tons. We obsess about this nonsense. If you shot for the military, ammo would come in a bucket. If you were in one of the better militaries, by the time you had fired a few of those buckets, you would hit where you wanted to. Not because the bucket of ammo shot internet groups, but because of rounds down range.

Hitting what you want where you find it is a dark art.

“Hitting what you want where you find it..” is kinda to me what shooting is about. My second oldest has taken you smallbore shooting. The more he shoots the better the average score happens. He’ll start doing club circuits next year.

It’s not for me. I go and shoot small game mainly with .22 or 17HMR. Not many rounds fired in a week but usually connecting with a animal of some sort. I miss as well. The misses i put down to a bad rest/over thinking etc etc. The firearms are accurate for the job. So it’s the human factor (in my experience) that causes the misses. I don’t do a lot of range work(if any). Might put a few rounds for functionality reasons through if I’ve bought a different brand of ammo to try it or get kids to have a plink. As Tussock has eluded to, kids keep you poor. I like to believe I have enough muscle memory built you to anytime get a rifle and go and shoot something with a result. These are my findings for my conditions.


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