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Due to a recent arrest and the subsequent press conference, the Sheriff of Santa Rosa County in NWFl has encouraged homeowners to shoot anyone breaking into their property.
The Sheriff’s department is now offering gun safety courses to encourage gun owners to safely own guns. These courses do satisfy the requirements to apply for your concealed carry permit.
The course is only open to residents of the county.
This is not the same post as the other one that talks about pushing your shots to the right of where you are supposedly aiming. All these posts are dependent on the fact that your sights/optics are dead on. Are you sure they are??? I’ll go over that in another post because that’s a whole other issue.
This is still about your non firing hand, but more so covering the unconscious push you give to the fire arm when you have already been at the range all day trying to look like you are the professional shooters you watch in the videos with their arms way out in the boonies on the hand guard. I get it- some people like it to have more control over the muzzle, but man, that gets tiring doing it for more than a couple mags. Same goes with shooting large caliber handguns or a high amount of rounds in any caliber, you get tired.
If you find your shots are creeping up as you begin to think “just one more box, one more mag, one more change of the targets THEN I’ll leave” then you are this guy (girl, velociraptor, other) that needs to take a rest.
Your second hand is telling you time is up. You are unconsciously anticipating the shot and your non firing hand is overcompensation and pushing the firearm up. When I notice this, I pack it up and take off. Think about it next time you are out there and let me know if this helped out or if you just left the range too.
Perfect example of this is how Andrew Lincoln holds pretty much any gun on The Walking Dead. Barrel pointing down, not using the sights. It’s an extreme example, but accurate to be sure.
What I’m getting at is the habit of anticipating the boom before the trigger breaks. When this happens, you are subconsciously pushing the firearm forward and the barrel down.
This happened all the time with my Sig Sauer P250 45 ACP when I first got it. The break point also acts as the safety and therefore it seems like it takes forever to break. My shots were all lower than I aimed. Once I realized this it went so much more on target until I started to get fatigued.
Have you ever thought about why your second hand does while your primary hand is slowly squeezing the trigger to the rear? Where is your left hand, right handed shooters? What is it doing? I’ll bet it’s pushing your shots off target!
On your pistol, your secondary hand is usually over your firing hand. On your rifle, it’s either on the magwell (like I do), on the handguard, or on the vertical grip (or other device) you installed. I mean, it’s got to go somewhere unless you are awkwardly holding it behind your back.
If you look at the picture, you’ll notice the shots that are all to the right of the target. This shooter was pushing their rifle as the pulled the trigger with their secondary hand. Consciously thinking about making sure you aren’t pushing the rifle or pistol should fix this problem.
In this post, We get into the placement of the shot after leaving the cartridge. This first one is mainly based on finger placement and how you are squeezing the trigger.
When you place your finger on the trigger, for basic shooting it should be right in the middle of the pad of your finger. When you look at your finger, the swirl of your finger print (assuming you have one and haven’t filed your finger to remove the prints) should rest on the trigger.
If you look at my previous post with the picture of the target, you will notice in blue, the shots that are left of the center. This comes from pushing the trigger as you pull. When you notice this, consciously take a moment and ensure you are squeezing the trigger to the rear and not pushing the gun while trying to fire.
In the last post, I covered knowing where the break was when it comes to pulling the trigger and finger placement. Today, I’ll cover why the trigger break comes into play.
Knowing where the trigger breaks and the BOOM occurs will help jerking the trigger regardless of where your finger is placed on the trigger itself. You may not think that the aftereffect of hearing that BOOM would affect your shot but this is where knowing the break comes into play.
Once you hear the boom and you are not prepared for it, you will either push or yank the trigger (again, regardless of placement) and this is when your shot goes off target despite your breathing being on target.
The next thing I’d like to cover is finger placement on the trigger. There are multiple different things to address with this.
First things first; with any gun the ideal way to shoot is to have a smooth and steady pull to the rear. After firing a gun a few times you can learn where the break is for how much pressure it takes to release the bolt, hammer, etc. to fire the gun. This is important because to achieve a smooth trigger pull, you have to know when to expect the BOOM! (This does not apply to a Sig Sauer P250 because the trigger break feels about a mile long. Speaking from personal experience.) I will have more tomorrow on finger placement, but breaking this down step by step brings up more to elaborate on and I want to keep this bite sized.
I want to help you troubleshoot shooting. This first one is mostly pertaining to rifle shooting at distances over 25 yards. If you find that your shots are all over the place, the main thing to check is your breathing. If you’ve never heard of your breathing affecting your shooting, then this is going to be eye opening to you. First off, make sure you aren’t holding your breath, it makes it harder to shoot. Second, take a minute to watch your sights on the targets while breathing steadily. They will be moving in roughly a figure eight over the target. The further the distance, the bigger the eight will be. When the sight post/reticle/red dot passes over the center is when you want to take the shot. The Marine Corps taught me that this comes when you breathe out at the end of your breath.
