Thursday, April 24, 2008

Learning Shooting Technique

Riflecraft is tricky because while you have a longer sight radius and better sights than pistolcraft, you are shooting at much longer ranges. I generally don't bother shooting pistols past 10 yards, but the Ommelanden rifle range goes out to 50 meters (~55 yards) and that's still pretty short by rifle standards. These longer ranges requires actual technique to support the weight of the gun and build a level of consistency that I haven't found in practical pistol shooting.

There are essentially 4 shooting positions: prone, sitting, kneeling, and standing. This is useful information, but like many explanations I've found, these are overly brief. Finding detailed explanations of these is difficult and the devil is in the details. Example: do not support your elbow with your knee when kneeling. It's like trying to balance one ball on top of another one, everything just starts rolling all over the place. Oops. Many of the detailed guides are also very text heavy and picture light, which also isn't helpful.

This week I stumbled across a short YouTube series called Improving Your Shooting, created by a high power rifle competitor. While he hasn't gotten to the classic Standing, Sitting, Kneeling, Prone rifle positions yet, he does have three videos on sling use (hasty sling, the leather 1907 sling, and the GI web sling) and one on shooting from a bench. Since I've been trying to find explanations of good sling technique forever, these were a real boon to me. Now I just need to put sling swivels on my .22

If you know any good sites on the subject, feel free to list them in the comments.

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