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...]

Skeet Doubles Doubles is the fastest game in skeet. At registered shoots, the normal five-person squad takes an hour or less for each shooter to shoot 100 targets.   During each round of 25 targets there seems to be someone shooting all the time; it's a fast but fun event. Of course, it's more fun if you're hitting them well. Skeet shooters are used to shooting doubles on stations 1, 2, 6 and 7, so they have a lot of practice at those stations, but stations 3, 4 and 5 are where they don't normally shoot doubles. Station 8 is not shot in the doubles event. Since they get a lot … [Read more...]

Rushing One of the errors that newer and some experienced shooters make is rushing their shots. An experienced shooter I shot with last weekend had that problem, you could see that he wasn't ready when he called for low 8 in the last round of the 28GA. He missed it.   You see young people rushing their shots a lot. At station 1, they load two shells, shoot the high house single and almost as fast as they can, they call for the low house. They miss the low house more frequently than they would if they just slowed down a little. An experienced gentleman I trained to be a NSSA … [Read more...]

Watching Watching better shooters execute their shots   When you're attending registered shoots, watch the shooters that consistently shoot 'the scores' that put them in the winners' circle. By watching how they shoot their particular shots you can compare them and see what they might be doing to shoot shots you may not hit consistently or ones that you want to hit in a different way. Many years ago, Steve Tucker, a gentleman I used to shoot with, became an excellent skeet doubles shooter. He was already a 'AAA' class shooter in doubles as well as regular skeet, but he wanted … [Read more...]