Myth – “Even though the group isn’t centered I don’t want to adjust the sights because I already have a zero.”

Fact – A zero is only as good as the placement of each correctly called shot.

FM 3-22.9, Page 5-21
“KD Zeroing. The 300-meter target can be used at 300 meters to confirm weapon
zero or to refine the zero obtained on the 25-meter range. The zero on this target is more valid than the zero obtained on the 25-meter range . . . Soldiers should fire two 5 round shot groups to confirm zero or three-round shot groups to refine their zero.”

The term “zero” implies no deviation from the point of aim to the point of impact. Because line of sight is straight and the trajectory is not zero is used in reference to a number of different things:

• Mechanical – physically centering the sights
• No Wind – windage setting for a given lot of ammo, disregarding environment
• True – specific sight setting for a specific shot in a specific environment
• Battle (BZO) – no wind setting that allows the shooter to ignore the distance to a target of a certain size just beyond the distance zeroed for.

Differences in environment (temperature, air resistance, altitude), ammunition lots and other factors can yield a zero change. Provided you fired and called a good group, never be afraid to make adjustments. This assumes you can accurately call each shot . . .

Myth – “Dry firing guns can damage them or wear them out.”

Fact – Dry fire exerts virtually no wear on most firearms.

Other than some slight wear and tear on some moving parts, dry fire does no harm and is crucial to learning to shoot better. Besides, if a firearm is doomed to failure if exposed to dry fire how can it ever hope to withstand the tens of thousands of pounds of pressure exerted inside the barrel every time a live cartridge is discharged?

Let’s pretend that dry fire will wear out parts prematurely. Ammunition is expended after one firing and must be replaced in order to shoot again, too. Having to occasionally replace some other component is just the cost of learning how to shoot better.

Myth – “Breath Control is the critical component of marksmanship fundamentals.”

Fact – Shot placement is determined where the barrel points, as indicated by the aligned sights, when the trigger is pressed.

It is common, especially in military circles, to believe that breath control and/or breathing has some mystical effect on shooting and will magically cause shots to go high or low.

Any movement, whether caused by breathing or any other factor, will show as motion in the sights. While the hold may wobble, the shot will always be where the aligned sights indicate when the trigger breaks (assuming a good zero and ignoring trajectory, of course.)

All breath control does is pause the shooter’s respiration while executing shot(s), thus helping to minimize movement. That’s it! Pause breathing while pressing the trigger and breathe normally at any other time.

The problem is novice shooters often tend to hold too long, over-staring the sights, holding their breath until blue in the face, and probably inducing a flinch just to be rid of the chambered round. Breath control alone can’t cause shots to go high or low. Even if it somehow could, the shooter can see that aiming error with the sights. This assumes the shooter can call shots and fire without flinching.

Breath Control does have one important contribution to improved marksmanship: If you’re on a range and over hear “advice” such as “Watch your breathing” you can probably ignore anything that person says about marksmanship because he has just identified himself as someone who doesn’t understand the subject.

Myth – “Our unit/department shot the qual course a bunch of extra times. It was good training.”

Fact – Shooters improve by focusing on core fundamentals and maximizing feedback.

FM 3-22.9, Page 1-9
“Feedback (precise knowledge of bullet strike) must be included in all live-fire
training. The feedback is not adequate when bullets from previous firings cannot be identified …”

The only way to yield consistent improvement is to maximize feedback so the shooter so he can compare his efforts to the results. Some of feedback that would be useful to receive would be:

• Shooting on a feedback target plotting the exact location of each shot. This can be done on a KD range or electro-acoustic/LOMAH targetry
• Recording both the call and actual location of each shot in a data book
• Dummy rounds and dry practice interspersed with live shooting
• Video recording the shooter as he trains
• System to trace movement before, during and after a shot, dry or live (i.e., Noptel)
• A good coach to help interpret the results

We often can’t have all of this available but the more feedback a shooter can get the more he can learn and, consequently, the better he’ll perform. As you can see, RETS “pop up” courses offer almost no feedback. Field courses are fine for testing and qualification, but not for training and learning.

Myth – “Touching the magazine on the ground will induce a stoppage.”

Fact – Touching the magazine of a many firearms, especially AR-15/M16/M4 –series rifles, has no adverse effect on functioning and has been PROVEN to be reliable and stable for decades.

FM 3-22.9, Page 7-3, Figure 7-5
“Once the basic firing skills have been mastered during initial training, the soldier should be encouraged to modify positions, to take advantage of available cover, to use anything that helps to steady the rifle, or to make any change that allows him to hit more combat targets.”

Certain detachable box magazine-fed, self-loading firearms may be susceptible to stoppages if the magazine is touched. The AR-15 series, including M16/M4s, is NOT one of them.

Since the introduction of Commonwealth-style International Combat shooting to the US Army in the early 1990’s, military teams have been adapting the good skills learned in National Match-style shooting to more freestyle events shot with rack-grade gear. Being a combat match, no alibis are granted. Any stoppage has to be cleared on the clock, therefore, equipment and technique must be reliable.

If touching the magazine caused stoppages nobody (at least not any winners) would use it because any risk of malfunctions would cancel the stability benefit. For about two decades the winning technique has been to use the magazine as a base of support when possible. From a tactical perspective, Mag Prone puts the shooter in “Helmet Defilade”, the lowest possible shooting position where the shooter’s helmet and muzzle are the most prominent things an enemy target can see.

The Reality of Hunting World Records

In the past I’ve discussed my SHOT Show observations and how the gun industry is failing to promote itself, as witnessed by what programs the big players are (and are not) putting emphasis on. If you missed it, here’s a one-sentence synopsis: The folks who work with actual end users (i.e. rank-and-file gun owners and hunters) realize the way to recruit, retain, and develop a positive community presence is by hosting and promoting quality events but big companies would rather focus on the gizmos that they sell, even though this will have no effect for successfully promoting shooting, or successfully marketing their products in the long run.

I recently had an illuminating discussion with a person who has never hunted or even fired a gun before. When he asked what I do, I told him about HunterShooter, about how I’m working to form an organization that establishes marksmanship events for hunters and promotes the winners as champions, just like the NFL establishes football contests and promotes their champions.

His response was priceless:

“You mean they [hunters] don’t do that already?”

He isn’t the first non-shooter to make such a comment to me. It’s been my experience that people with no shooting background who don’t harbor bias towards hunting or gun ownership assume that hunters must have an organized way to test skills and advance their champions, but because these non-shooters aren’t personally involved, they just haven’t heard about it.

It is a reasonable assumption. Kids with skateboards do this much. Witness the rise of the so-called X-Games. Certainly an institution as large and established as hunting does the same thing with their marksmen. With big game seasons lasting a few short weeks surely dedicated hunters must do something hunting related during all that down time.

You would think…

Apparently, if the large gun organizations, publishers, and companies have their way, this off time activity should be absorbing the over-priced advertising and ‘articles’ they sell to the manufacturers trying to convince us that we need to replace the perfectly good shooting gear we currently own with a newer new if we want to be successful on the range or in the field.

The problem is this doesn’t fix any of the big problems. Take the Remington case as reported by CBS. Is the problem a ‘defective’ trigger unit that has been in production for decades and is good enough for target grade rifles, such as the 40-X? Or is it poor operator maintenance and the sloppy gun handling displayed by box-a-year hunters? What’s worse, even in the hands of a more competent hunter ‘better’ equipment still helps little.

Let’s look at some of the world record trophies and how they were harvested.

Milo Hanson Buck
Rifle Used: .308 Winchester Model 88 Lever Action
Scope Used: K-4 Weaver
Bullets Used: Winchester 150-grain Pointed Soft-Points
Distance of Shot: 100 yards

Ed Koberstein Buck
Rifle Used: Remington - Model 700 BDL - 270 Caliber
Bullets Used: Hornady 130 GR Spire Point
Distance of Shot: 43 yards

Ed Broder Buck
Rifle Used: Winchester 32 Special
Distance of Shot: under 100 yards

I’m not a trophy hunter and don’t place much value on the trophy rating systems such as Boone and Crockett points (see below) but these animals are as good as a hunter has a right to expect. The ‘world records’ were taken at close to moderate range with typically boring equipment. Nobody in his or her right mind could argue that using ‘better’ equipment would have made any difference.

What should we focus on? Organizations like Boone and Crockett do our community a valuable service. I am not trying to imply they do a poor job on the whole, only that there are a few crucial topics that need to be considered but have been missed.

The inherent flaw in the Boone and Crockett rating system is that B&C points are awarded based on measurements of an animal harvested in fair chase and NOT based on the skill of the hunter. From the accounts of ‘World Class Records’ it is pretty obvious that the ‘world record holders’ were/are mediocre riflemen. They were up to the challenge presented at the moment of truth, and that is certainly commendable, but the challenge presented was of less-than-heroic proportions.

• Koberstein waited all of 10 minutes before the hunting gods bequeathed upon him a ‘world record’ within rock-throwing distance.
• Hanson and his friends fired well over a half dozen misses at what should have been reasonable distances before anchoring the animal.

I give these guys credit for admitting that their harvests were thoroughly unimpressive, but I have to resist gagging when the title of ‘world record holder’ is attached to them. It’s like claiming the winner of a lottery is a financial genius.

We’re actually living in the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, non-gun owners believe that hunters are organized enough to run tournaments to test their skills, but we don’t on any serious level (yet). On the other hand, even if we were doing so, the idea of marksmanship as a ‘real’ sport is so foreign to most folks, including many gun owners and hunters, that they dismiss the concept as silly. More than one sports “journalist” has made some mindless remark about how shooting isn’t a real sport. Gun owners stand appalled, whining about the anti-gun media, and then do nothing to change the public’s perception.

“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

The lower the actual skill in a particular area the more likely an incompetent person will overestimate his personal ability and be incapable of accurately assessing another’s skill. This study almost perfectly models the problems found in marksmanship.

The solution is to bring more gun owners out to organized events. If you haven’t tested your skill in open competition against others you simply do not know where on the skill continuum your abilities lie. Sadly, as this scholarly study points out, without this critical feedback you probably can’t accurately judge for yourself.

Myth – “Competitive shooting isn’t ‘real’ shooting.”

Fact – Weapons only put projectiles where and how their pointed and don’t care what they’re pointed at.

Official Army policy (Army Regulation 350-66, see below) is that competitive shooting is useful, provides great training, and should be encouraged at all levels.

A firearm is a chemically-operated, mechanical projectile launcher. Given proper functioning, projectiles only begin their launch when triggered to do so and follow a path directed by line of bore. It can’t think or feel and only responds to the skill and technique of the operator regardless of the target shot at. If you can’t hit a target on a range you won’t magically gain the ability to hit it anywhere else.

Any range that isn’t “two way” is a simulation. The quality and significance of the simulation is as good as the course designer makes it. Any simulation is inherently abstract and relevance is very subjective so it will never be perfect for all people and situations. This is true of any course and isn’t a problem with competition shooting, per se. Participants can either step up and accept the challenge as presented, or step up and design something else.

The stress of the simulation is as intense as the participants can be pressured with it. Qualification attempts to only filter out the worst performers, ensuring that everyone is “qualified” (at least that’s what the training records claim.) “Qualified” can entail a whole range of skill levels. If the goal is get everyone qualified then the standards have to be adjusted so that everyone can.

Competition, on the other hand, attempts to filter out the best performers. Nobody cares what an adequate performance is because the goal of competition is to find what the best possible performance can be. The stress of qualification is to be good enough. The stress of competition is to be the best possible.

In order to have any meaning we have to measure performance by devising a way to reduce it to numbers such as points earned, elapsed time, etc. Any course can be created or adjusted in order to emphasize and reward a desired performance.

Army Regulation 350-66
Chapter 2
General Competitive Marksmanship Policy
2–1. Small arms marksmanship

Participation in military and civilian-sponsored small arms marksmanship competitions offers soldiers the opportunity to refine their marksmanship skills, compete against other military and civilian marksmen, and earn superior marksmanship awards in addition to the Army basic marksmanship awards available through annual qualification standards.

a. Army personnel should be provided opportunities to prepare for and participate in small arms marksmanship competition. These preparations, which include those for international competitions, are classified as training.

b. Authority for planning, directing, conducting, supervising, and publicizing competitive marksmanship activities within the Army is delegated to the lowest possible command element. Plans for competitive marksmanship activities will include provisions to publicize excellence in marksmanship, both internally and externally.

c. Competitive marksmanship match programs must include Excellence in Competition (EIC) matches. In addition, the program of matches will include a National match course individual rifle and pistol EIC match provided adequate facilities are available. Credit toward the Distinguished Designation Badge may be earned.
d. Match programs should emphasize and encourage the following:

(1) A variety of shooting styles, distances, and timing of firing with as many weapons and weapon systems as possible.
(2) Training of experienced competitive marksmen.
(3) Development of shooter/instructors.
(4) Off-duty competitive marksmanship activities.

e. MACOM participation in international level competitions is authorized and encouraged.

Ever wonder why some military hardware has these funny names?

It’s a electronics designation system designed by the Army/Navy during WWII called JETDS (Joint Electronics Type Designation System).

Each JETDS device has a three letter code designating its use, prefixed with A/N and ending with the series/model number. Some examples:

A/N PAS-13
Army/Navy, Human Portable, Invisible Light, Detecting - Search, Model 13

A/N PEQ-2
Army/Navy, Human Portable, Laser, Combination Purposes, Model 2

A/N TVS-5
Army/Navy, Ground Transportable, Visual/Visible Light, Detecting - Search, Model 5

A/N PRC-77
Army/Navy, Human Portable, Radio, Communications (two way), Model 77

Intuitive, right? ;-)

Full documentation is here:

http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r105_19.pdf

http://www.milspec.ca/radcodes/ancodes.html

http://www.tpub.com/content/neets/14191/css/14191_108.htm

http://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/electronics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army-Navy_Equipment_Code_Designators

http://www.usmc.mil/directiv.nsf/82001916d226893285256d12004936dd/3b2c29d4e8b9301d85256770004ee451/$FILE/MCO%2010550.8.pdf

Army Times recently reported about an attempt at improving current Army rifle qualification lead by a new organization staffed by former special operations personnel calling themselves the Asymmetric Warfare Group.

Members of the Small Arms Readiness Group met with JP (John Porter) of the AWG and discussed their training.

Overall, their training seems quite good and it is apparent that someone in the know is involved.

However there were a few concerns. For starters, they seem intentionally vague on a number of technical issues and rely on the strength of their “operator” backgrounds to sway the right people into accepting their program.

Some examples:

• JP pointed out that AMU was their customer unit three times and was completely sold on the AWG’s course, until we mentioned that we had already met with them earlier and then the story was that the AMU was co-consulting with them.
• The phrase “Outcome Based Training/Methodology” was pushed. When I wanted specifics and requested a POI he said that they don’t have one and teach “off the top of our heads.”
• When asked “What measured outcome are you basing your training on?” one AWG instructor sort of skirted the issue and said I could have a CD with “all the material you need.” That CD contained class overviews, handouts and some courses of fire but I have not yet found any defined standards/outcomes other than that Army Times article.

Most of their big ideas concerning shooting have existed in various circles for years, especially in the competition world. In fact, their targetry consists of steel and cardboard IPSC/USPSA competition targets and LaRue self-resetting steel (similar to Pepper Poppers.)

I could find nothing suspect about their material or methods, however, Big Army could have asked any well-run competition shooting team for this info twenty years ago and had the same answers. Too bad nobody wants to listen to us mere competition shooters. So now, former SF/Delta types have repackaged this same body of information initially created by competitive marksmen, created a slick (but sparse) pamphlet about it, and make news in Army Times.

The good news to those of us involved in organized shooting is this:

Competition shooters make a difference!

Quite often we don’t receive credit, as this case clearly demonstrates, but the important thing is that the good info eventually filters down.

You can bypass this filter and get your experience directly from the original source. Get involved in organized shooting today!