I did a bit of shooting today. Nothing unusual about that. But after I finished my first magazine and pasted the bullet holes another shooter came around. He was planning to sight in his pistol I’ve Tentatively ID’ed it as a Berretta 96. I’m not 100% certain.
He was having a very hard time hitting anything with his Berretta.
Anyway, I’ve helped other shooters in the past. There was the one time a shooter was having problems with his 1911. He was certain it was the gun. He permitted me to try a magazine a magazine worth of ammo. I shot a
very tight group with his pistol, Much tighter than he was shooting. The problem was obviously him and not the pistol.
Flash forward to today. I loaded 5 rounds of .40 S&W in a magazine, loaded magazine, and without ever fired a Berretta in my life I hit the target 4 of 5 times. The trigger had an enormous length to travel before firing. But as soon as I got it I had no further problems. After removing the magazine we both went down range and looked at the target. It was a reasonable group for 25 yards. Granted, the 4 hits were on the bottom, but if I can do that without ever shooting the pistol before it sure isn’t the guns fault.
So I went and shot another 30 rounds of .223 downrange, he fired another 4 or 5 rounds at his target. He missed every time. OK, let’s load 5 rounds and shoot from 10 paces away. In a nutshell he was looking through the sights wrong. He was way, way high and to the left. But once he figured it out he was shooting nicely tight groups. I took him to see my target at 100 yards. I had my Standard Group, which, I’m going to admit here, was the best group of the day. He said I must have been using a scope. No, I wasn’t. When we got back the benches I told him to look for the scope. The only scope I had with me was my spotting scope.
He figured out what was wrong and corrected it; I had a decent day shooting my M16 and its 11½ Upper. The sun was shining; it was cold at the start but warmed up to the high 50’s to low 60’s, very little wind.
We both wound up hitting what we aimed at. A day like this is hard to beat.
Pardon me while I start cleaning my rifle....
This post has been edited by GiggleSmith: November 7th 2009 9:57 PM
November 7th 2009 2:26 PM
