A key to accurate shot placement

Seasons Greetings all!

I just want to share something with you hardcore fellow airgunners like myself. Now, I don’t know about some of you but I can expend a dozen of .22 tins of pellets in way less than a week. Yep, that’s how much time I spend on improving my marksmanship. Having said that, I find myself making trips to my local shop buying a case of pellets almost every week. With the rising costs of ammo, I may have to cut back on my shooting sessions. Yikes!

Though it’s unfortunate that pellet prices are up, I am also fortunate to be discovering new and more effective shooting techniques from those practice sessions. So, in a way, the shooting makes up for the cost (but I’m still angered by the pellet prices right now 😈 ). Anyway, one of those effective shooting techniques is what I’d like to share with you today, should you have the time to read further, and it is maintaining a balanced hold throughout the rifle.

Sir Isaac Newton stated that when something is at rest it is completely at rest, and when it is caused to move it will do so in a straight line. Now, putting this perspective into holding a rifle, you will find that if you hold your gun at its most balanced point – and I’m talking vertically and not just horizontally as what few shooters only do – it will stay straight, erect (he he he), and will not move. Thus, it’s safe to say that the gun is now at full rest, just like how it is rested on, well, a benchrest. Now, with respect to Newtonian law, upon firing – granted you also incorporate other critical elements like breathing control, trigger technique and what have you – I believe the rifle will move in a straight line. Whether you shoot a PCP or springer, the gun will still move and you can’t stop it from doing so. So, you’ll have to let it move where it naturally wants to.

Thinking about how the aforementioned is so, I reason that when weight is more or less biased towards one side from a standing or rested object, when it moves rearwards (with PCPs) or both frontward and rearward (with springers), there will also be some simultaneous movement directed towards the side that is heavier. This is why some shooters will experience unexplainable flyers even when their scope has been zeroed at the same distance the shots were made at. If you imagine, say, an unopened can of Pepsi laying on its side in space where there is no gravity, with a gentle nudge to the butt of the can it will travel in a straight line in the opposite direction. Moreover, just like in a motorcycle, the rider must balance his weight along with the bike’s weight in order for the bike to ride straight. When making a left turn, for example, the rider must compensate for a now-heavier left side by shifting his weight to the right side in order to keep the bike balanced and in motion and to avoid a crash.

So what about those bubble level devices that are supposedly to keep your rifle leveled? Well, that’s just it, they only help to keep your gun “level” and not “balanced.” No matter how perfectly aligned the scope to the rifle’s bore, if a gun is not balanced, a shooter is almost guaranteed to get inconsistent shot placement with respect to what I just mentioned earlier. This is so because the base of the stock that sits on the shooter’s forestock palm is usually not as flat as and perpendicular to a completely flat surface. Moreover, although the bubble level is placed on the flattest surface on the gun it does not necessarily mean that particular area will be balanced when the bubble is centered. Oftentimes this is the case. You can even try it out yourself if you have a level installed on your gun. Find the natural balance point of your gun and watch your bubble level be totally off to one side. Therefore, even though the bore may be aligned to the bubble level, and if the shooter is not aware of the overall rifle’s balance, when shooting, the laws of physics will still come into effect. And as they say, you can not defy gravity.

So what is the technique then to keeping a rifle balanced when holding it? Well, what I do first is find the balance point between the muzzle and butt of the gun. The (horizontal) balance point is where I will place my forestock hand by opening it flatly as to emulate a flat base for which the bottom of the stock can rest on. Then I will give the pistol grip a very loose hold to no hold at all. Finally, the butt of the gun will only kiss my shoulder; I make sure that it does not press too hard against it. Doing all of these enables me to find the natural horizontal and vertical balance point of the gun so that when the trigger is pulled the rifle should only move straight – front or back depending on the gun.

Of course, all of the things I said here might seem illogical. After all, I am no physicist, nor do I have the experimental tools to conduct a proper experiment. However, I tell you this: from all of the shooting sessions I had and observing all kinds of negative rifle and shooting behavior and finding ways to work around or address them, the technique I have just shared with you greatly helped to dramatically improve my shooting. And if it has benefited me in such a way, I am sure it will for you as well.

Shoot safe and Happy Holidays to you all!