USING ONE’S BRAINS IN SHOOTING
Pistol shooting is not merely the mechanical art most people think it is,
a man who does not use his brains and think out things will go on making
the same mistakes all his life and never improve or become a good shot.
There is no such thing as luck. A bad shot means a fault somewhere, and
the good shot is he who can diagnose the cause of this fault and correct
it.
I saw a most ridiculous instance of a man not using his brains.
A man was practising next me at Gastinne-Renette’s. He shot some two
hundred shots, beautifully grouped but all to the left.
I asked a friend if he had noticed this. He answered that he had seen this
man shooting constantly, that he was a regular attendant and had been for
years.
He always put his shots to the same side of the target, and had never
discovered that if he only aimed a little to the right, he would hit the
target.
I saw a man counting stamps at an hotel. He was wetting his finger to
turn them over and got the whole lot into one sticky mass.
This latter man was perhaps so used to counting paper money by wetting his
finger that he was doing it mechanically with these stamps whilst thinking
of something else.
The former man looked an intelligent man and was so most probably in his
business, but he cannot ever have used his brains in pistol shooting.
I put a man right once who was shooting at a black “man” figure in
competition.
He shot very badly. I asked him what was the matter. Unlike most men who
tell you to mind your own business, and make you chary of helping any one,
this man asked me if I could assist him.
He said he could not see his front sight on the target and feared
something was wrong with his eyes.
I showed him it was not his eyes but the black front sight of his pistol
on the black target which was at fault.
I put a big blob of Chinese white on his front sight squeezed from a water
colour tube.
He won first prize with a highest possible score.
Like the conventional man with his doctor who has cured him, he never even
thanked me.
Getting into bad habits in shooting has constantly to be guarded against.
A horse is very apt to get carrying his head crooked, tongue lolling,
hitching, etc., unless he is constantly corrected. So must a shooter
watch and correct his own faults.
It is as well to get a good shot to watch you shooting occasionally and to
point out to you undesirable tricks or habits you may be getting into,
without noticing it.
Some men, when shotgun shooting, gradually get into the habit of carrying
the muzzle too low so that they sweep others as they walk. This is the
result of shooting much alone, and so getting out of the habit of noticing
when they are swinging their guns across others.