So I kind of suck at shooting pistols

[PzGren]

We all have an opinion and so do I. A good shooter should be an all-rounder and accuracy is a big part of it. It isn't for nothing that it was said that the master was made at 20 yards and IPSIC and IDPA were both started with defensive shooting in mind before it turned into an equipment race.

In order to learn pistol craft properly it is necessary to have learnt the basics of marksmanship and remember them. Remembering them takes constant reinforcement and training, just as speed shooting does. The physical aspect in the shooting sport should never be underestimated and hand strength is of vital importance for a fast double tap.

A baby learns to crawl before it starts to walk, runnning comes later. It is the same in pistolcraft.

[44 AMP]

A baby learns to crawl before it starts to walk, runnning comes later.

While generally true, there are babies who don't learn to crawl before they learn to walk. I raised one. Never crawled and walked at 10.5 months. Her brother, on the other hand crawled all over and didn't walk until he felt like it....

[stinkeypete]

1. Join a club with a weekly .22 bullseye (precision) pistol league. Sign up for it. Start shooting. Take photos of your targets with your score on them every week.
2. Read the AMU pistol training manual. It's online.
3. Start doing hand exercises with a tennis ball while surfing the web.
4. Get a decent air pistol and shoot for practice indoors a few times a week. Keep score.
5. Talk to the good shooters at your pistol league to get pointers.

I realize that all the rage now is shooting really fast at enormous steel pizza pans at 10 yards but I maintain that shooting slow, medium and rapid (5 shots in 10 seconds. But you have to hit a regulation target!) and being able to HIT WHAT YOU AIM AT is a very handy skill when shooting pistols.

Once you start to practice seriously and several times a week, and learn what a "Natural Stance" is.. you'll find that your scores begin to climb slowly.

You'll find that shooting the same score with a centerfire pistol is REALLY HARD, not because centerfire is all that less accurate, but because of FLINCH. It's for real. So once you can shoot in the high 80's... try that in centerfire.

Back when I was shooting regularly, a buddy of mine claimed that the only reason I could beat his scores was that I had a dot optical sight on my .22. I turned my dot sight off and just used it as a huge ghost ring. I still beat his score.

He tried my gun and got his best score ever. "I need a new pistol, this ruger is junk."

The guy that always won our league was a High Master and kindly always managed to miss enough weeks to not qualify for the trophy. He asks if he can shoot my pal's Ruger, then proceeds to shoot a 96 with it. Iron sights. "I could tune this up for you, but it's not too bad."

Lesson: for us beginners and intermediates, a great trigger and sight will buy us points and help develop good skills. To get to the top level, it's practice, skill and natural ability.

When you have that down, say after a year of league shooting, you can just pick your pistol up and shoot pretty well without even being conscious of aiming. Concentration? You can shoot even better.

[UncleEd]

FireForged may be onto something.

[Houndog]

OP - Thanks for starting this thread. I feel that I'm kind of like you. Have been shooting pistols for fun for many years, but feel like my skill level is not only frozen, but frozen at a pretty mediocre level.

The one thing I thought I was decent at was slow fire for accuracy. Then I read JohnKSa's post. If I can't shoot 1" groups at 10 yards I either have a tremor, poor eyesight or a serious flinch? On a good day, shooting a very accurate .22 with a red dot I can keep about 80-90% of my shots in a 3" circle at 50' (which is less than 17 yards). So I kind of suck at this as well.

And put any kind of time pressure on me and take away the red dot and things fall apart pretty fast. If I really try to shoot for speed that 10" plate that's 7 yards away might as well be the size of a dime.

[JohnKSa]

I don't want to discourage anyone, but in my experience, if a person can see the sights and the target clearly, control the flinch/anticipation, hold the gun steady, the gun is capable of decent accuracy and there isn't a problem with the ammo, it should be possible to shoot 5 shot, 1" groups at 30 feet/10 yards with some level of consistency if the shooter is really taking their time and paying attention to basics.

That would correspond to groups about 5" at 50 yards. Since the 9 ring on a 50 yard NRA precision pistol target is about 5.5" in diameter, this level of accuracy would correspond to being able to shoot a 9 or better on the 50 yard target with some level of consistency if the shooter is really taking their time and paying attention to basics. But remember, we're talking about two-handed shooting without time limits and under no pressure, not the one-handed shooting with the (albeit generous) time limits and the competition pressure that go along with bullseye.

Basically it works out to about 10MOA.

If that's not how things are turning out, if groups shot under the conditions above are significantly larger than 1", then there's almost certainly an issue with anticipation/flinch.

[Houndog]

So here's a thought for those of us that feel like we suck at shooting pistols ... suck compared to who?

My guess is that 75% of the guys in the U.S. have probably never held, much less shot, a handgun. Include women and that number goes up substantially. And some of this is regional. I used to live in MA and would guess that between it's liberal, antigun bias and the gun laws fewer than 1 in 10 guys have handled a pistol. So, depending on where you live, even if you can barely hit the side of a barn, you're still a better shot than 80-95% of your neighbors who would have trouble loading, much less shooting, a handgun.

And focusing of the 10-20% of the people who do own and occasionally shoot pistols - go to your public indoor range. Take a look at how many bullet holes are in the ceiling, floor, and side walls. Observe your fellow shooters. Yes, there will be some old guy in the corner shooting an even older bullseye gun one handed and printing 2" groups at 25 yards. But there will also be a bunch of people shooting full sized silhouette targets at 7 yards and barely keeping their rounds on paper.

So yeah, compared to a top bullseye shooter (or a top IDPA/IPSC/Steel Challenge shooter) most of us suck. But at least we're practicing and trying to improve and our pistols don't sit in the safe gathering dust. I mean there are over 300,000,000 people in the U.S. If a million of them can out shoot you you're still in the top 1/3 of one percent.

[JohnKSa]

That's true. Most people have real trouble getting good results with a pistol.

What I said wasn't intended to make people feel bad about their shooting, but rather to give them one possible issue (that happens to be the most common one I see with pistol shooters) to work on in their training if they want to improve. The OP seemed to be asking for ways to improve.

People who are shooting for fun and are happy with their performance should just keep on doing what they are doing.

[cdoc42]

The only time I shot competitively was in college with a .22 LR Rifle Team. After that, and until now, I'm just a fun shooter. I entered the handgun phase of my gun "career" with a Hawes Western Marshall .44 Mag that hurt my third right finger so badly that I traded it for a Ruger SuperBlackHawk. That instantly fixed my problem, which in turn encouraged my growth of interest, stopping at .454 Casull.

When I was in my 40's, I shot bowling pins off-hand (2-hands) at 200 yards with a Ruger SuperRedhawk and a Tasco Pro-point red dot sight. Now 40 years later, I can only do that off a rest.

I have a "Eze-Scorer" 12" x 18" BC IPSC Practice Target that I recently shot, hanging on the gun safe. From 7 yards, 2-handed, I fired 61 shots. 45 of them were 9mm and 16 were .380 Auto. Of 5 shots at the "head," 2 were in the "A" and 3 were in the "B" rings.
There was 1 each in the "C" and "D" rings.

In the 3.25" x 6.25-inch "A" ring I found 54 shots (96%), with 49 in a big hole, 1.4-inch group.

The single, most important reason for this "success" was I concentrated.
My greatest weakness is failure to concentrate, which invariably provides for a bad day at the range. Maybe I misread it, but I thought JohnKSa suggested success was 10 shots at 10 yards in a 10-inch ring. That day, went out to try, and I did it with my Kimber .45 ACP. Three days ago was totally and completely frustrating. I started and easily hit 7 of 8 bowlings pins at 10 yards with the .45 ACP. At 15 yards with an 1873 Taylor's .45 Colt, I hit 3. At 25 yards with the Ruger .44 Mag, I hit 3. WHY???

I caught myself flinching and slapping the triggers. Recoil doesn't bother me -so I think. But in these situations, I was clearly anticipating recoil and I stopped concentrating. The lesson to learn? Stop and analyze why you are not achieving your goal. Concentrate on fixing it. As a non-competitive shooter you will eventually succeed enough to satisfy yourself, but you will invariably have days when you have to reassess what you are doing wrong. Practice. Analyze. Repair. Practice. Don't give up.

[Houndog]

I suspect most of us are really just competing with ourselves. Personally, the one time I've ever shot pistol in any kind of competition was about 20 years ago I shot some kind of silhouette match with my trusty Smith & Wesson 610. (Steel pigs, chickens, rams, etc. at various distances). I came in second. Of course there were only 3 competitors in my division.

Really only care about how others are shooting because it provides some kind of metric I can use to evaluate how I'm doing - i.e. am I a pistol God because I can consistently hit a bowling pin at 10 yards? Do I suck because I can only hit a 6" steel plate at 30 yards 6-7 out of 10 shots?

Ultimately, it's really just about having fun and hoping that, with practice, you at least show some incremental improvement. Particularly if you're shooting slow fire, for accuracy, at distances of 30+ yards since that's not the kind of shooting you're likely to do in a self-defense scenario.

[L. Boscoe]

dry firing with a red dot is a big help in seeing what you are doing before during and after the hammer falls.

[JohnKSa]

... am I a pistol God because I can consistently hit a bowling pin at 10 yards?

In a pistol class I took some years back, the instructor had everyone shoot at a bowling pin at 50 yards. Everyone hit it eventually, but only two people hit it on the first try. One of them was the instructor.

Do I suck because I can only hit a 6" steel plate at 30 yards 6-7 out of 10 shots?

At 30 yards, 6" is about 19MOA. Being able to keep 60-70% of your shots within 19MOA at 30 yards is definitely not "sucking".

If you are satisfied with that level of achievement, I don't think that's really a problem--you're doing better than most pistol shooters. But if you want to do better, I think that's within the realm of what's possible.

[stuckinthe60s]

red dots dont compensate for wind.

[Rothdel]

Thank you for all the helpful replies. Its nice to see several people share my concern. I've checked out a lot of the resources on this thread and am attempting to take the advice I can. Again not a lot of class options that fit my schedule.

I think the other thing that has become apparent to me after reading this thread is that the idea of proficient and good are different things to different people. As I reflect on why I wrote this post I think that might be the crux of my problem. As I read posts or watch Youtube the idea of what a good shooter looks like gets skewed. I get to the range once or twice a month if I'm lucky. I have many interests in shooting and my tastes vary depending on the day so a trip to the range may be .22 pistols or shotgun sports, or sighting in my bolt guns. I don't focus on one discipline most of the time. The only exception to that is my carry guns (1 summer/1 winter) that I practice with enough to feel comfortable with all the time. In the case of my expectations I want to be feel confident that I can put an entire magazine directionally where I aim at 7-10 yards. I can do that. Its not super fast, groups are not the size of a nickel, and I'm sure I could improve. While I will try to improve after reading the posts here for my needs I think I'm proficient and even good for my needs. I'm not a competitive shooter in any discipline and consider myself a hobbyist at best. I like guns. I like shooting guns. I'm good enough to hit what I aim at with in reasonable distances to what I would ever need. Maybe thats good enough.

[JohnKSa]

In the case of my expectations I want to be feel confident that I can put an entire magazine directionally where I aim at 7-10 yards. I can do that. Its not super fast, groups are not the size of a nickel, and I'm sure I could improve.

For self-defense shooting, you really don't want tiny group sizes. That would mean you're shooting too slowly. What you would want for self-defense shooting is to keep all your shots in the A-zone of one of the "practical" pistol sports targets while taking a minimum amount of time to do so and shooting from no more than about 10 yards. Ideally you'd like to be able to do that while moving.

[stinkeypete]

In my opinion, if you can hit what you're shooting at with the first shot you don't need to shoot fast.

Long time ago, I started shooting air pistol in my basement as I got back into shooting handguns. It was a nice competition air pistol.

It was like throwing darts. I was relaxing, sending pellets one at a time diagonally across my basement... 9 meters was the farthest I could get. I was shooting at 10m NRA air pistol targets and keeping score.

After a while, I wondered "hey, am I doing good at this?" I talked to some guys online.. I was shooting in the mid 90s. "Even at 9 instead of 10 meters, you should go to a competition! You won't be the worst guy there!"

Well, I could not find an air pistol league near me, but there was a .22 league. I did not embarrass myself. But it did end up costing me a target .22 and soon a target grade .45acp. Then a hunting handgun, then.. ah, you know how it goes.

I don't know who sponsors these combat style, shoot really fast competitions. But I can see the fellows use a lot of ammo and throw perfectly good magazines by the fistful into the gravel at their feet like they are trash. That's stuff people can sell to shooters.

The guns don't need to be tuned to be highly accurate, these guns are just good enough and only a rare few cost as much as a bullseye .45.

But if you want to know how you're doing.. you can't tell your pals on the internet your speed.. unless you went to a competition first to get times. There are no postal idpa matches.

[natman]

Originally Posted by Rothdel

When I say I suck what I mean is shooting a .25 inch group at 50 yards which seems to be common place in most gun forums or on YouTube.

I'm willing to believe that you may be able to improve, but a good first step would be to set more realistic expectations. A quarter inch group at 50 yards is pretty decent shooting from a 22 rifle. With a target scope. From a bench.

To expect similar results with a pistol freestanding is to guarantee frustration.

[TunnelRat]

Originally Posted by stinkeypete

I don't know who sponsors these combat style, shoot really fast competitions. But I can see the fellows use a lot of ammo and throw perfectly good magazines by the fistful into the gravel at their feet like they are trash. That's stuff people can sell to shooters.

Letting a magazine fall to the ground when it is ejected is not, to me, the same as treating it like it is trash. In the dozens of pistols I have owned I have yet to have a magazine actually take damage from doing so. Now I don’t doubt some have and will, but the idea that it’s some kind of especially harsh treatment is head scratching to me.

[JohnKSa]

In my opinion, if you can hit what you're shooting at with the first shot you don't need to shoot fast.

For bullseye that's right. For self-defense type shooting, that's not a great idea.

People are usually highly concerned about dying in gunfights and so they don't stand still, get into a perfect stance, take careful aim and make a perfect shot. They are usually moving (trying not to get killed), probably aren't in a perfect shooting stance, may not have taken time to get a perfect grip on the gun, may be focused so strongly on the threat that they don't see the sights. In those kinds of situations, even really good shooters can miss, and make less than perfect shots.

Some people soak up bullets surprisingly well. It's not for nothing that most experts recommend that you keep shooting until the threat is ended as opposed to just shooting one time. For one thing, it can be really hard to tell if you are making hits in the middle of a gunfight. For another, seconds count. The first shot may be fatal, but if the guy can keep shooting for another 30 seconds, you may die too. Better to keep going--maybe the next shot will end the festivities a little faster--and a little faster may be enough to keep you alive.

From what I've seen in real-world shooting videos, most people find it very difficult to not shoot really fast. In other words, when your brain starts screaming that you are about to die, your finger's going to go into turbo mode. At that point, if you haven't practiced shooting fast, the results aren't going to be very good. If self-defense is your goal, you'd better practice shooting fast because you WILL be shooting fast if someone's trying to kill you and it would be nice to have some solid experience under your belt.

[Shadow9mm]

Best advice? Get some paper plates for targets. If you can hit anywhere on the plate thats a great goal. You can put a target sticker in the center or draw a dot with a sharpie of thst helps.

Do dry fire. Shoot 5 rounds, dry fire 5 rounds, repeat. Work on that good trigger squeeze. And keeping your sights steady.

Focused on the front sight, not your rear sight or the target.

Keep pushing your distance out. 5yds, 10yds, 15yds, 20yds, 25yds.

Heres a great vid on pistol training for defensive use. Really good fundamentals. https://youtu.be/F8MvKIiXC2M

[cdoc42]

This may be an aside, and if so, I apologize. If defensive shooting is generally 10 yards or less, why do those who test the various handguns in the gun magazines always (it seems) do so at 25 yards? I often think that if I am ever in a threatening situation separated by at least 25 yards, my first thought (if possible) would be to retreat rather than engage.

[JohnKSa]

While the statistics say that it's more likely that a justifiable shooting will happen at short range, sometimes the range can stretch. When Elisjsha Dickens took down the Greenwood Park Mall shooter, some of the shots he fired were taken at 40 yards. When Jack Wilson took down the West Freeway Church shooter, he fired his shot at about 15 yards.

There are circumstances where justifiable shootings can take place at ranges significantly longer than 10 yards.

Second, the longer range makes the test a bit more informative. A firearm's group size increases with distance and by shooting groups at longer distances, the differences in group size also increase which makes the comparison a bit more informative.

For example, let's say we have two pistols, one that is capable of shooting 4.8MOA groups and one that can shoot 5.2MOA groups.

We test them both at 7 yards and record the group sizes rounded to the nearest tenth of an inch. Both pistols shoot 0.4" groups since 4.8MOA @ 7 yards is 0.35" and 6.0MOA @ 7 yards is 0.44".

On the other hand, if we test them at 25 yards and still record the group sizes rounded to the nearest tenth of an inch, the 4.8MOA pistol shoots 1.3" groups and the 6.0MOA pistols shoots 1.6" groups. The longer distance amplifies the accuracy difference and now the recorded group sizes, rounded to the same precision as the 7 yard groups, show a significant difference in accuracy between the two guns.

[TunnelRat]

Originally Posted by JohnKSa

The longer distance amplifies the accuracy difference and now the recorded group sizes show a significant difference in accuracy between the two guns.

When John says the group sizes now show a "significant" difference, that difference may now appear significant, but the relative difference never changed (you can do the math manually or use a calculator like this https://www.indecorous.com/bullseye/moacalc.html and see that one pistol shoots groups 80% the size of the other at both 7 yd and then again at 25 yd, which makes since as 4.8 MOA / 6 MOA = 0.80.)

I am aware the above seems pedantic, but in the work I do the word significant generally has a mathematical backing to it.

[Recycled bullet]

A self defense shooting sounds kinda scary

[JohnKSa]

When John says the group sizes now show a "significant" difference, that difference may now appear significant, but the relative difference never changed (you can do the math manually...

Of course--that's exactly the point. The MOA value (the size of the group measured in terms of angle) stays the same while the group size measured in inches show a larger difference. That larger difference, measured in inches, makes it easier to see differences in accuracy that might be harder to see if the targets are shot at closer range.

The point is that measurements are always made with some level of precision and are generally rounded as well. There's also always some error in any measurement. By stretching the distance at which the accuracy tests are performed, the differences, though the same in terms of angle, get larger in terms of group size measured in inches and that will help emphasize differences in accuracy which makes it easier to compare the sizes and also de-emphasizes any measurement accuracy.

In an extreme case, imagine testing two rifles at 7 yards, instead of the more common distance of 100 yards. One rifle is capable of 0.7 MOA groups while the other is only capable of 1.9MOA.

Measured at 7 yards, the difference in group size will be 0.09"--less than a tenth of an inch--but measured at 100 yards, the group size difference will be 1.26"--well over an inch.

Now, let's say that we can only measure group size accurately to the nearest 0.05". At 7 yards, 0.7MOA is 0.05"--right at the limit of our measurement accuracy and 1.9MOA is 0.14".

That means the error in our measurements is pretty significant compared to the measured group sizes. The difference in the two group sizes is 0.09" but the error on the two measurements that generated that difference is nearly as large as the difference itself. In other words, the difference may be significant, or it may actually just be mostly the unavoidable "noise" in the measurements we made.

But the difference at 100 yards is 1.26"--that's quite a bit larger than our measurement error of around 0.05"--so we have some confidence that the difference in group size is significant and that any contributions due to measurement error are not going to make a bid difference in the outcome.