On Shooting Poorly

At the risk of sounding a little like Jerry Seinfeld, what is it about inconsistent shooting? One day I’m on my game and another day I’m off.

Yosemite Same (Bill) and I had our bullseye league last night. My shots were all over the place, especially during the first relay of slow fire. One round didn’t even hit the paper. I haven’t done that in years. I ended up scoring at least 65 points lower than I usually do; and, that was only after I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and got a rally going.

Last night I was ready to box up my target pistol and stalk off the range in a towering rage. I wanted to throw my box of ammo at the target thinking that I might get a better score that way. As if I could throw 25 yards (I throw like a girl, but I come by it honestly). Thank goodness everyone was wearing hearing protection and couldn’t hear my inventive profanity.

No one who has not shot a gun before can understand that accuracy comes from achieving a zen-like state. If you concentrate on your breathing you’ll throw off your trigger control. If you think about your trigger control, you’ll throw off your sight alignment. You can’t force accuracy, it just comes.

My poor shooting last night wasn’t the guns’s fault. It wasn’t Bill’s fault. It wasn’t the range’s fault or the fault of other competitors. It was all my fault. That’s the beauty and the pain of shooting. You’re up there all by yourself and you’re putting the bullets where they hit. Oh well, there’s always next week.