100 years ago, in a galaxy far, far away… I was at the best rifle tourney in the WORLD. Back then, before the age of nose jewelry, pronouns and institutionalized nincompoopery… if you were an adult on the rifle range and safe… you could do some interesting shooting games. The guys at that club nigger-rigged a “running deer target”. It was a plywood silhouette cut out approximating a white tailed deer. Two pulleys suspended him from a clothesline that ran across the range at about 125. When the shooter was ready, the silhouette zip lined across the range and you got to shoot at a lrunning deer”. Most shooters failed dismally. I know I did the first time. After the shoot one of the pros held an impromptu clinic on shooting moving targets and with a little coaching we all started making hits. I was able to further hone my skills utilizing an improvised rolling tire target on the farm. It’s a remarkably easy skill to pick up and when people see you make shots like this, they’ll think you’re a sniper.
There’s only a few tricks: keep the ranges short - the shorter, the better - and open iron sights or low magnification scopes. I only ever tried three shots at running game animals and made them all with clean, one shot stops. I turned my nose up at many times that too though. In brush, tall grass or timber the shots become impractical.
Man, he appears to be bookin' !! If a 100 yards away, at least a body length should do it.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't a bit of shotgun training help out here in terms of leading?
ReplyDeleteI've shot at two already wounded whitetails, two separate events, many years back. Both times my brother made a bad shot and we wanted to stop the deer ASAP to prevent it holing up somewhere and suffering before dying. Made hits both times but pretty certain those were shots I never could repeat on demand.
Both times started with looking down the sights and swing the rifle slightly trailing the deer, increase the sweep rate until the rifle swing is faster than the deer, watch as the sights pass the deer and pull the trigger right after passing up where I wanted to hit. Sounds simple but it ain't.
Also my range has pussified greatly in order to passify all the neighbors who bought adjacent homes in subdivisions that were built decades after the range was built. They knew it was there, bought anyway, then threatened to shutdown the range afterwards. In any event, we're basically restricted to benchrest only shooting on the rifle range. Pisses me off a little, but then I'm more of a handgun guy and still have the open bays off to the side.
Then there's the fellas that can shoot clays with a rifle.
ReplyDeletein my youth we would take old tires filled in with cardboard and roll them down a long hill. the tires would start jumping about halfway down. it was great fun and good practice.
ReplyDeletehaving to haul them back uphill was not much fun though. but we were kids with nothing else to do.
Lets Try this now in Brave.
ReplyDeleteSo, Historical Fact: In WW2, the intel-wienies and analysis kids interviewed THE BEST fighter pilots with the most kills.... Euro-Side AND Pacific. One common denominator they found was almost ALL of the Aces were guys who shot skeet/trap and/or hunted birds on the regular as civvies.
They naturally applied the same mental logic/tracking they used when shooting at skeet/birds when they started taking on Airplanes, hence their almost 'natural abilities' to shoot down a far-mover.
In the Infantry, they taught us how to lead/range a moving target with repeated 'cold target' training. In the case of the TOW Missile, downrange we had a M998 HMMWV with a big assed target board on it that perpetually drove back'n forth on Lee Field while we learned and honed our tracking skills. At night the target board had the ability to 'heat up' a metal tank silhouette that shined like a mo'fo on our 1st gen primitive assed Thermals.
The same thing went with Machine Guns, the M2 Ma Deuce, the M-240B, and MY personal beeeatcha, the M-249. (her name was 'Jackie' and had her name painted on the receiver, and since I was the armorer, I could authorize such shenanigans, Jackie as is she was gonna Jack You Up)
Now, lets see if this works (hits publish) annnnnnd...