In the beginning, there was a gunshow

I’m often asked how I became a good pistol shooter. Looking back across some 35 years of pulling a trigger, I can see how fortunate I was to be exposed to some good techniques and attitudes early on.

In my opinion, it’s not how long you shoot per se, it’s what you choose to train yourself to do that matters. It takes 5 to 10 thousand reps for an action or routine (such as resetting and pressing the trigger) to become hard wired into your subconscious as an automatic response to a command or stimulus (such as the appearance of the aligned sights on the target area). If you learn that action incorrectly, it probably takes five times that many reps to overcome your erroneous skills by learning a new, dominant routine. We tend to stick with what we learn first. The old platitude about teaching an old dog new tricks applies to us.

Thus, the difference between a decent shot and a great one may simply be that the great shot was fortunate enough to be exposed to correct technique early in his or her career, and therefore had fewer technique problems to unlearn and correct later on.

In my case, I was really lucky. I bought a Smith & Wesson M&P revolver (4″ barrel, s/n 120607, made in 1906, with factory stag grips no less) at the Sacramento gun show when I was, ahem, almost 15. (OK, that was then.)

The guy I bought it from threw in two boxes of funky .38 Special wadcutter reloads, and a book on Olympic shooting by the Soviet sports medicine researcher and coach Dr. Yur Yev.

“That book’s not of much practical use, just a bunch of Commie mumbo jumbo about Olympic shooting, with some faggy photos of naked Russkies holding pistols and stuff. You look like the kind of kid who’d like that.”

I overcame his implied insult to my as-yet unformed manliness, and I read it on the bus trip back home to Rancho Cordova. I re-read it obsessively until I understood the classic concepts of mental focus, natural point of aim, breath control, sight picture, alignment, trigger press and release. There was a reason why the Soviets dominated in Olympic shooting.

So, from the very first time I shot that old M&P, I have had a strange ability to shoot little groups. No matter what, I can always shoot a group on demand. However, this doesn’t mean I have some particularly strong, innate talent for shooting.

Shooting groups is a bit of a parlor trick, like ventriloquism or picking the ace of spades from a full deck, but I can always do it because when I started shooting I had no other frame of reference, no other competing technique or ego-driven agenda for my shooting to compete with the pure process of sight alignment and trigger release.

Had I been handed a copy of “Kill or Be Killed” or “Cooper on Handguns”, I might never have become a highly skilled competitive shooter, nor ironically even a decent defensive marksman. With my poodle-sized attention span (PiPi beats me at chess, the bitch) I might not have ever been able to overcome an ingrained trigger jerk or some other fundamental errors that a less rarified first experience would surely have caused me to develop.

Knowing this, I have taken it upon myself to develop some good methods for teaching core practical shooting fundamentals. Like all other highly experienced marksmen, I have come to recognize trigger control as the essential skill of all shooting. Everything else we do ideally supports the task of pressing the trigger and releasing the shot while the bore is aligned with the target.

The only real difference between various shooting sports is the amount of extra stuff we have to do to support that simple process.

As a side note, I was heartened by the reports from a family friend who just came home from his initial basic in the Corps. Already a good rifleman, he says they spent one full week simply dry-firing their M16A2’s before the live fire training. They never used them in 3-shot mode, and they were all expected to hit stuff way out there. They all could, after 1000 good trigger presses a day for a solid week. I admit I’m sorta weird about this trigger stuff, but it’s with good reason. I’ve never been the fastest shooter in IPSC, but I’ve never regretted having the ability to hit the targets.