Aiming is Useless

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 12/8/2016 | J Hines

[w1n1]

According to Rob Leatham 6x IPSC World Champion! That's right coming from Rob Leatham. When it comes to shooting, few are at Rob Leatham's caliber so when he's got something to say about shooting, we should pay attention. Or, shouldn't we?

Without questioning Rob's shooting ability, there has been debates on the different school of thoughts when it comes to "instinctive" shooting to precise shooting, or, accuracy shooting to speed shooting. As you can see the list goes on, we have written one piece when the NYPD shooting program came under fire when their officers were missing their shots in actual incidents, when lives counted.

Which ever side of the fence you stand on, Rob's statement is sure to perk your interest and opinion on shooting, here’s 3 things that Rob talks about to make you a better shooter.

1. Hold the Gun Really Tight
2. Point the Gun at the Target
3. Pull the Trigger w/out Moving

See the footage here, what do you all think?

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Never let this guy use the bathroom in your house.

[Grampa Dave]

I’m one of the right handed individuals with my left eye being my true eye. Great for batting baseballs and can be terrible if you try to aim with your right eye while shooting.

My uncle had the same neural network and became a sniper in WWII.

He taught me to never aim with either eye, but to look with both eyes down the barrel or even with the scope. Point and shoot with both eyes open.

I have broken 100’s shooting trap and skeet. I seldom missed quail, pheasants, ducks or geese. I have tumbled running deer from 50 yards to well over 100 yards with a 30.06 and a simple 3x scope. I tumbled a running antelope at about 100 yards.

With shotguns and rifles, I, an adult son and grandkids with the same eye issue, prefer to shoot left handed guns and hold the gun with our right hand and use our left hands as the trigger hands. That way we don’t have to worry about hot ejected cartridges smacking us on the way to the ground.

When shooting a revolver or semi auto handgun, I hold the gun in front of me with both hands with my right hand as the trigger hand/finger. Again I seldom miss. If I ever get into a shooting situation with another, I would turn sideways to minimize my target profile, the handgun would still be held by both hands, with my right hand as the primary and trigger hand, again with both eyes open.

I didn’t do much bow hunting, but the same son and one of his lefty dominant eyed kids use left handed bows and again aim with both eyes open. This son has killed wild hogs, west coast deer, mulies, white tailed deer in the midwest, an antelope and elk with his left handed bow. It takes a lot of practice to develop the necessary strength in his non dominant arm to accommodate his true eye, his left eye.

In a way we aim, but we really use both eyes and point and shoot.

Re the grip on our guns. We use only enough grip to keep the recoil from causing a potential problem.

[Geronimo]

Use one hand and sight along your arm and just the front sight thousands of times and when you get comfortable with that switch to your weak hand for 5k rounds...

[Windflier]

“At night, at a gallop, against a moving target.”

I did something like that when I was fifteen.

A rabid dog came onto our properly and began attacking our dog. I ran to get my mom’s .25 cal Beretta to stop him.

By the time I got back, the rabid dog was on the street attacking everything that moved. He was trotting away from me at about 50 yards when I pointed the pistol and pulled the trigger. He took two more steps and collapsed dead on the sidewalk.

A crowd gathered to look at him, and we couldn’t find a bullet hole anywhere. Took a moment for us to realize that I’d hit him square in the anus.

One in a million shot.

[sten]

he’s trained so often, he’s actually aiming through hand-eye muscle memory

this is also known as ‘being in the zone’

[Boogieman]

“Whether he is doing so consciously or not, cannot tell, but I would venture a guess that it is more instinctual now.”

True, but when they say “don’t aim”, they obviously only mean “don’t aim consciously” since you have no control over whether you aim unconsciously.

I’d say he makes sense. I noticed the same thing when I used to shoot pool a lot. Once you have the basic skills down, the more you aim, the worse you play. When your subconscious knows what it needs to do, just get out of the way and let it happen.

[Frederick303]

Actually Karl Bernosky, who was the NRA rifle champion something like 6 or 7 times was a top rated Bianchi cup shooter.

He is quite the marvel though, having become a champion shooter at NRA high-power, 3 position small bore, trap and Bianchi cup. In general I think you are right, few NRA type shooters are champion Bianchi/ISPC/3-Gun shooters.

That said from my very limited observations at the club level, when folks shoot cross discipline, it is a lot easier to make a competent/good if not spectacular 3-gun shooter out of an NRA bullseye shooter than it is to make a competent bullseye shooter (again: not a master just considered good) out of a fairly adept/highly skilled 3 gun shooter.

I have seen a detailed oriented competitive rifle shooter become a very good trap shooter in short order, by simply breaking down the Tap game to a number of takes and then mastering them one at a time. within a few weeks he was shooting in the 22 to 24 range (out of 25), at which point he quit (when he could get to 25 occasionally).

That said I think it has something to do with the natural inclination of the shooters, precision shooters seem to have a different mind set than instinctive/hunting oriented shooters. They are all into studying, breaking down the act of shooting to its component parts and . Also I think they train a lot more on the fundamentals of classical marksmanship, vs. the speed mastery which makes the fast shooters so phenomenal.

As to utility, I have read in more than one book that most snipers come out of the hunting ranks, not the competitive ones, at least in the WWII to Vietnam era when what they did was closer to what is today called “designated marksman”. So on that side of the ledger it seems to me that traditional bullseye competitions have a lot less practical nature than most of the speed based shooting sports.

[fella]

Practice, Practice, Practice, Practice, Practice . . .

If you can afford it, do this until hitting the target become natural.

[Hulka]

Wow. . . gives a whole new meaning to “shot in the a$$”

[Garth Tater]

he’s trained so often, he’s actually aiming through hand-eye muscle memory

With enough practice you can take the eye out of the equation. Shoot from the hip, so to speak. Roy Rogers taught me to shoot when I was 4 yrs old and I've been following his example ever since. Clear the holster, fire.

It takes a LOT of rounds to hit a 9" target at 15' every time but an Airsoft PTP (Professional Training Pistol) brings the cost down to less than a penny a round. My 1911 PTPs use up a lot of CO2 to cycle the action and generate the perceived recoil but other than the noise they are remarkably similar to the real thing.

[DocRock]

Lucky McDaniel was the father of instinct Shooting (Quick Kill) and I had the privilege to train under him.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

He is just going off muscle memory from shooting at the same distance for tens of thousands of rounds. Make thevtarget high or low, and it would no longer work.

[gundog]

Google Paul Schafer, archer.

[BipolarBob]

My son was on horseback, at night, galloping when an illegal alien vehicle he was chasing in the desert

He was lucky! The one I had was hovering over me and transported me onto their space ship and probed me without lubricants. I'm still traumatized.

[Redcitizen]

Travis Walton, is that you?! :)

[MarkL]

If you have a natural gift for shooting, and if you practice shooting a tremendous amount, you will probably be able to shoot very accurately by “point shooting” at short range. But even the finest shooters, capable of accurate point shooting will use their sites at distance.

For instance, Bill Jordan was able to hit Necco Wafers and even aspirin tablets at 10’, drawing from his holster and shooting from the hip. But he used the sights on his revolver regularly.

Mark

[marktwain]

I asked my friend, George (Tex) Ferguson what was the best discipline to practice to get ready for combat with a pistol.

He had killed a lot of people and was said to be the second most decorated American soldier in WWII.

He said, without hesitation, the bullseye pistol course.

That is one handed shooting at bullseye targets.

I was surprised, but he said you had to learn the basics, and bullseye taught you that.

He took the U.S. Army pistol team to Moscow to compete against the Soviets, during the Cold War, as their coach.

In my opinion, what Leaham is doing is unconcious aiming. He has used the gun so much, starting with aiming, that he no longer needs to conciously think about the sights. I have a freind in similar condition. He can hit man sized targets consistently at 25 yards with a .45, without sights.

But you have to hone your skills first to where you can hit and know how to do it. Aimed fire is necessary, at least for the vast majority of people, to learn to do that.