THE WRONG WAY TO LEARN
Pistol practice varies in different countries.
As duelling is still general on the Continent, practice with the pistol is
conducted differently to that customary in the United States or England.
On the Continent most men of the upper classes have at least a rudimentary
acquaintance with the foil and duelling pistol, but in the
English-speaking nations a man has rarely ever handled or even seen a
duelling pistol, or the few who have done pistol shooting have never shot
except at a stationary bull’s-eye target.
At the English National Rifle Association at Bisley, the attempt was made
to induce men to practise at moving, rapid-firing, and disappearing
targets, as well as advancing and retiring ones, but these had reluctantly
one by one to be given up, owing to there being so few men who cared to
shoot in such competitions.
In the days when I used to compete regularly at Bisley, I do not think
there were more than half a dozen of us who competed at the sliding
target, and even fewer at the rapid-firing one.
We, in those days, used revolvers and black powder, which made such
shooting very difficult owing to the smoke obscuring the target.
I give at the end of this book the best targets, full size, made in these
competitions which will now remain permanently the best on record, as the
revolver and ammunition are no longer made. They will rank with the “High
Wheel” trotting records as “Hors Concours.”
Any one who wishes to compete in revolver-shooting competitions in England
must modify my teaching in the preceding chapters, and refer to my _Art of
Revolver Shooting_ for details of competition.
The duelling pistol is not used in England, but there are many revolvers
still in use there; England is the last country to use the revolver in the
army, and is the last refuge of the revolver, just as Yellowstone Park is
the last refuge of the buffalo.
For competition in England, practising will have to be done with a
revolver, not an automatic pistol, and a deliberate aim taken at a black
bull’s-eye on a white target.
In the United States, the automatic pistol is the sole weapon now. Several
Challenge Trophies, which I modelled and presented to various
associations, have had to have their conditions altered to “automatic
pistols” from “revolvers,” and as the automatic inevitably tends to rapid
shooting, the days of stationary target shooting are numbered.
Many people defend shooting at a stationary target, on the plea that one
must learn one’s alphabet before learning to read.
This is correct _as far as it goes_, but they carefully omit to add that
after a boy has learned his alphabet, he goes on to reading, and writing.
He does not merely repeat his alphabet all his life.
Just the same argument is used by those who say that blundering through
Greek and Latin, with the help of a dictionary, teaches modern languages;
that these latter are “so easy after a grounding in Latin and Greek.”
If it is so easy why do they not learn modern languages. They cannot speak
a word of any language but their own, and even the few sentences of Latin
and Greek they can parrot-like repeat, no foreigner can understand, as
they pronounce them with the English vowel sounds. For the same reason
they mispronounce all foreign names.
A Russian who cannot speak French and German as well as his own language
is considered entirely uneducated.
A man may be a crack shot at a stationary target and yet be absolutely
useless with his pistol in case of having to use it in a hurry at anything
in motion.
If you want to learn something, learn it, do not learn another thing, so
as to be prepared to learn something else later on, _if_ you care to.
If you want to eat a peach do not first drink ten plates of soup, and eat
a leg of mutton, or you may not have the time or desire to eat the peach.
If you want to learn practical pistol shooting, learn it, do not waste
time learning unpractical shooting.
You not only waste your _time_, but you spoil your “_timing_,” which is
the great thing in pistol shooting, and also your sense of direction. You
get into the habit of putting up your pistol and then searching for the
bull’s-eye, instead of having it all come by instinct, like putting your
spoon into your mouth.
I can tell a man who is not a practical shot, by the way he first finds
his sights, and then hunts round for the target with them. If it were a
live target, it would have made itself scarce while he was searching for
his sights.