Unload Your Guns Many years ago. a group of my friends and I went Rabbit hunting near the South Central California towns of Taft and Maricopa at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley where there are some Texas-sized Jack Rabbits. There were six or seven of us that frequently hunted together, and another four guys we knew joined us a little later in the morning. We had never hunted with this new group before, and they seemed to be less experienced than our group. The area we were hunting in had rolling hills that slowly rose in elevation, and we walked two or three hours going up one … [Read more...]

Watching Other Shooters Recently, we shot a one-day registered skeet shoot, just the 12 and 20 gauges.  Four of the kids we teach through the SCTP were also shooting the competition, one of them on our squad. The rest of our squad was made up of experienced skeet shooters. One of the shooters, our squad leader, had a very unorthodox style. He had shot for many years and developed a method of hitting a significant number of targets with this style of shooting. His first two rounds were solid, but his last two rounds were significantly worse. While his method of shooting worked for him, I was … [Read more...]

Lessons Lessons--why take them.   You shoot a lot of skeet. You believe that just shooting a lot will make you a better shooter. The truth is that this can work for you. The problems are that, with this method, it might take you years to learn to shoot as well as you could. You might be practicing incorrect methods that will hamper your improvement, and it might also be the most expensive way to learn your game. New shooters get all sorts of advice from other shooters that want to help the new shooter. Some of the help may be good, and some may be way off base. This is … [Read more...]

Safety There is nothing in any of the hints that we've seen in these pages that has any greater importance than safety.   Mistakes may seem innocuous and unimportant, but one little error can seriously injure another person, yourself or someone's property. I recently shot sporting clays with some one that is switching from shooting left handed to shooting right handed with a left-handed over/under. The lever was the only real difference. After this person shot, they brought the gun down and in order to open the gun, pointed the muzzle at a group of people no more than 30 yards … [Read more...]

100 Straight Hitting that elusive 100 straight...The desire of most shooters is to get them all, 100%.   This desire leads to a lot of shooting, especially practice sessions where we try to perfect the techniques we've learned, ingrain them and develop new ones that work for us as individuals. Becoming a proficient shooter takes time, practice and attention to detail. A journal of your shooting will help with the details. In a journal you can track which targets you hit with some consistency and which ones you may be having trouble hitting or maybe another way to hit a specific … [Read more...]