[Scattergun Bob]

I read your post, with the little you have said I'm afraid it would be "shooting in the dark" to try and help.

I think you have received lots of great insight into the what might be wrong.

I really wanted to talk you about one thing that you said "Getting pretty frustrated with my shooting". So many folks came to my fundamentals of shooting classes either failing to qualify or banashed there by superiors expressing your words or worse. I recognized that in some the only bad shooting habit they had was their frustration, and we all should know that practicing bad habits just engranes them more.

So I am going to cheerlead you a little with a story that I use to tell my people before we started remedial training, you can read or not, I'll give you the moral of the story up front, "once you have fixed this problem and are able to hit what you aim at, all of the rounds you shot yesterday or last week won't mean a thing." all is not lost, patience in shooting is a must have skill!

As A boy in my early teens I knew a man, Jacob Black, he was old as the hills around our ranch, a ferrier (horse shoer) by trade an a double action shootist by passion. I was a fair 22 rifle shot but had never really been around center fire pistols.

One day I screwed up enough nerve to ask Mr Black if he would teach me to shoot pistols, you see gilfo, Mr. Black could float a tin can in mid air with his two K-38 combat masterpieces firing double action, and I just had to do that. To my great joy Jacob said that it was a "right fine Idea" as long as I paid for my own components, and that I helped him reload. It ran about $1.50 a week in 1962 dollars, a couple of 3 hours of hard work for a ranch kid in those days.

So, every Saturday afternoon Jacob and I would spend in his work shack while I learned to reload, 2.4 Bullseye, 140 wad cutter. When we had "enough" loaded, Jacob sat me at the kitchen table and pulled out a K-38 4" showed me how it worked and said this one is yours to use, now lets go shooten.

Things at first went OK, Jacob was a very patient teacher, but as I progressed thru single action to double action to fast double action using the sights, it got very hard. I started shooting many more misses then hits, and then I would watch Jacob shooting pop bottle caps and floating tin cans off the fence rail double action not using the sights, and I became very frustrated about not getting any where and making noise about quiting.

That next Sunday I got invited over for supper, Mrs Black was a better cook than my moma and so I was there with bells on. It is there at the dinner table that I received one of the best shooting lesson of my life. After dinner Jacob said to me" you know Bobby, you shot a lot of misses the last few days, but they are not important, YOU CAN NOT INFLUNENCE THEM ANY MORE, they are gone and you must forget them. So lets go get the guns and go shoot, this time I want you to think about the shot coming up in front of the hammer, cause IT IS THE ONLY ONE YOU CAN INFLUNENCE! it has the chance to be perfect, if you are.

I would like to say that the heavens opened and I was much better right then, but it doesn't work that way, I did slowly get better, I did learn to forget about the previous shot and focus only on the next shot and my frustration level went away, as that happened I got better Quicker.

So The point is, that FRUSTRATION AFFECTS US ALL, IT IS JUST ANOTHER BAD SHOOTING HABIT THAT WE ALL HAVE TO BREAK.

By the way, never did get a tin can to float, can still skip one along the ground.


I don't know your shooting skill level, but I want to second the thought that if you have not taken a formal class in the basics of shooting, I highly recommend that. I recommend a basic skills level class, I know every one wants to be High Speed - Low Drag right out of the gate. However building those boring fundamentals will be the foundation on which to build what ever shooting sports house you choose. Without them it is very hard to progress.

If your in my area, leave an e-mail, we can get'er done, on the cuff.

Good Luck & Be Safe