[Unclenick]

Bart,

Yep! When my dad was still OSU's pistol team's coach, he pulled the flipped target on people frequently. It seems the urge to ambush the ten ring by yanking on the trigger when sight alignment with the bullseye is momentarily perfect, is a universally tough thing to convince yourself won't work. Take the bullseye away and you not only take away the ten ring to ambush, but you also take away the temptation to shift focus off the front sight and part way to the bullseye.

I heard an explanation of why you can't simply get a good, but displaced, group by trying to ambush the ten ring. It was on another of the Wormhole shows, called, I think, "Is there any such thing as luck?" A professor showed that because polypeptides in water in the nerves are subject to quantum randomness in their behavior, your reflexes have different speeds from one yank on the trigger to the next to the next. He used trying to control tossing a coin to land always the same way up, as an example. Even if you start with the same coin side up and try to control its vertical velocity and rate of spin by making the same motion every time, because of the nerve speed randomness, you don't. He was able to calculate that, due to nerve control randomness, it fell with just about the same 50:50 chance of heads or tails coming up as when you aren't trying to control it.


4 runnerman,

You do see that. Sometimes it's on purpose. Using a 6 o'clock hold to hit the center of the bull is the most common example. Benchresters don't like their holes changing the appearance of their aiming point. That's why they have those targets with both a circle and a square. But probably most folks just haven't dialed the sight in correctly. It's very easy to screw that up by "chasing the spotter" and getting into an adjustment oscillation.