The Shooting Thomcat

Have been doing my dryfire most evenings (average of 5 times a week thus far this year). Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't...

In general, when I remember things like working the trigger and looking at the front sight, my shooting goes just fine within certain limits. As an example, here is some video of me shooting 3 FAST drills as part of the 2012 pistol-forum.com Performance Challenge:



As you can see, when I remember to work the trigger and see the sights, I do fairly well. When I don't---then I get significant penalties. And I'm hit and miss these days, unfortunately. It isn't that I'm just randomly shooting and sometimes I get lucky--it is that sometimes I just push the gun out there and blast away.

Like an idiot.

Overall, my control and work at close distances has gotten better, though.

Distance shooting, bullseye-style, though? Is ridiculously bad. Part of the Performance Challenge (see here for details) involves shooting a bullseye target at 25 yards freestyle, strong hand only, and weak hand only. No time limits, completely slow fire.

My scores are HORRIBLE. I first did this as part of a Drill of the Week awhile back, and got a decent-but-not-spectacular 252. Tried it this past week---got below 200 once, and a 214 once. (215? Something like that.) I am consistently shooting to the right (enough that I really DO think I need to adjust my sights a bit) freestyle, which is bad enough---but my single-hand shooting is just horrible.

I can keep my shots in a 3 inch circle at 7 yards single hand (WHO or SHO) but outside of that, I tend to just point the gun in the vaguely correct direction and smack the trigger, with expected results.

[sigh] I hate bullseye practice. (Which rather explains this problem.) But it'll help, so I'm going to add that to my standard practice regimen. For every live fire practice, I'll end with some basic, slowfire bullseye at 15, 20, and 25 yards. (Depending on which bay I'm in.) And in dryfire, I'll work on my single-hand trigger control.

In addition to everything else.

I haven't even worked on any USPSA-specific skills yet this year. On the other hand, my movement is generally pretty good, my tactics/plans are generally solid, and my reloads are all right (plus my current practice will help with that). I'm thinking that oddly enough, my current practice will probably make a significant difference to my USPSA shooting, simply because the accuracy part is the part I've always been bad at. :) So maybe this year I'll start hitting what I need to...