Pistol shooting advice

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I went out to the range today to try out a .40 caliber pistol (Glock 22 the one I want to buy) to see how I could handle it and generally how it felt. This is the first time i've shot a real gun in almost 5 years. I know this isn't gonna be the best representation of my shooting ability since I have never fired a .40 before. But I think I did pretty well.

Heres the specs of what I shot.
Gun: Glock 22 .40 cal
Ammo: Federal .40 S&W
Total rounds Fired: 50.
Distance ~ 30 feet give or take.
Here are the groupings. I believe they are in order. I know the first one is.

Target1.jpg


Target2.jpg


target3.jpg


target4.jpg


It seemed like the more I shot the Sloppier the groupings were. I think it's because I was getting anxious about the recoil. But I'm not sure. I don't even know if there are enough shots there to make any kind of determination if I am doing something wrong or if it's just my inexperiance shooting in general.
Thanks in advance guys.
 
Welcome back to the sport. Nice work. Get a gun that's cheap to shoot and we will iron out all the bugs later.
 
Looks like a classic flinch to me. Practice pressing the trigger while keeping the sights on target with an unloaded gun. Then pick up some dummy rounds and mix them randomly in your magazine. When you hit a dummy, the front sights will show you exactly what you're doing wrong. When you get a dummy, pull the slide back just enough to reset the trigger and dry fire again. Keep doing this until the sights stay rock steady, then rack a fresh round in and continue.
 
Flinch/anticipating recoil. It gets worse as you shoot. Not a surprise. As jar suggests, ball and dummy drill. Also, do lots and lots of dry firing. Then the next time you are shooting, fire 10 shots focusing on one aspect only:

- first, just try to focus on the front sight. You should see every detail of the front sight. Fire 5 shots doing that, then repeat.
- second, just focus on pulling the trigger straight to the rear. 5 shots, repeat.
- third, focus on follow through after pulling the trigger. 5 shots, repeat.
- fourth, put it all together. Focus on the front sight, maintaining sight alignment, clean break, and follow through.

Btw, your accuracy looks quite good given your time off.
 
nice shooting!

it will get better with time. is it a 3rd or 2nd Gen G22?

reason I'm asking, I had a 2nd Gen G22 and my shots always were slightly left. but then i shot a 3rd Gen G19 and eventually got my hands on a 3rd Gen G23 and my shots improved more towards the center... or "evenly distributed" [laugh]

i have big hands with long skinny fingers, so the 2nd Gen Glocks are like holding a bar of soap to me....
 
Just like to add that you shouldn't let this get your confidence down or anything. Hold that target up over your chest and think about what the bad guy would look like - flinch or not.

That said, I battled through a flinch issue as well - I think most people do at some point. Keep at it, and it'll go away. The drills suggested above worked for me - be surprised by the shot going off as often as possible, and practice practice practice. But don't beat yourself up, either; if that target was a meth-face with a knife I think you'd have won the fight. [wink]
 
With the Glock, you have to get used to the trigger. Try to stage the trigger. Take up the slack, pause, then break the shot.

With practice, you will do this instinctively. And quickly.

Expect your shot groups to open up as you shoot more. If you haven't shot in 5 years, your hands and arms will start to fatigue and micro tremors will set in.

I always tell people that if you can only afford to shoot 200 rounds a month, you are better off shooting 50 rounds once a week, than 200 rounds once a month.
 
I appreciate the compliments and more so the advice. They both really help.

Chet: I honestly couldn't tell the difference between a 2nd and 3rd gen Glock if you put them both in front of me. I'm just not that familiar with them yet. If i had to hazard a Guess I would say 2nd gen. Since i hear 3rd gen glocks came outhere right before the ban in 98 and are really hard to find. I don't think they would use a gun they could get a lot of money for as a rentable gun.

Pernox: Oh if anything it raises it. When I finished the first group I looked over at my dad and he had the good ole' "WTF?!" look on his face. He's like yeah you should hang that one up. I told him we should put it on the front door as a theft deterrant...

Roland: Yes they were slow fire. I was waiting about 5 seconds or more between shots. Having never fired a Glock before I was getting used to the safety on the trigger it self. and trying to get a feel for the gun as a whole when I fired it.

Big Daddy: Yes I think after I get a few more tries with it and get more used to that trigger it self and the feeling of the recoil in general that I will be a lot more comfortable. Yeah I am gonna practice more here at home with my BB pistol holding it out for extended periods of time to get used to that feeling.
 
Looks pretty good to me so far. as mentioned get to the range and shoot often that is the only way to get better. Download a diagnostic shooters chart. I found this very helpful early on and still keep a copy in my bag to date.
Lastly by looking at your targets it looks as though you need more "support hand" with your pushing to the left, that is if you are a right handed shooter. Also the vertical grouping seen towards the end of your run is likely related to "peeking" at your shots after each one. Try and shoot an entire magazine without looking at where the bullets hit on the target. Just concentrate on floating that front sight on the target and pressing the trigger. Each shot should come as a surprise if you are manipulating the trigger properly. Overall not bad, Glocks are sometimes tough to get used to at first in my experience.
Check out this video by Todd JArrett that many have found useful in correcting small problems. A brief, but very helpful tutorial so-to-speak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa50-plo48
Good luck and enjoy
 
Then pick up some dummy rounds and mix them randomly in your magazine. When you hit a dummy, the front sights will show you exactly what you're doing wrong. When you get a dummy, pull the slide back just enough to reset the trigger and dry fire again. Keep doing this until the sights stay rock steady, then rack a fresh round in and continue.

+1 on this. Snap caps also help with dry fire practice. Listen to a lot of the instructors on this site and they will tell you that dry fire practice is as important, if not more so than the range.
 
That's the classic "40 flinch" as every new shooter to the 40 caliber finds. You have to do a lot of dry fire work and then, as the previous posts mentioned, mix in a dummy round or two. After a while, it will become manageable.

Dave
 
Dry fire will not get rid of a flinch, if you think your gun is going to fire will dry firing and you flinch, you might have a bigger problem.
 
If you dry fire correctly and work on a true surprise break, it will be an immense help with a flinch. Just think for a moment and recognise that if you do not know wnen the shot will go off, how do you know when to flinch.
 
If you are very very good, this is possible. If you or anyone else is getting low center shots this is the most likely cause.
The surprise break is one of the keys to accuracy and in no way makes you shoot more slowly. For speed shooting, we call it the compressed surprise break with the only thing that is compressed is the time
 
If you dry fire correctly and work on a true surprise break, it will be an immense help with a flinch. Just think for a moment and recognise that if you do not know wnen the shot will go off, how do you know when to flinch.

agree 100% with this. This technique will train you to do just as you stated "I want my shot to break exactly when I want it to, why would I want it to be a surprise? When the sights are on target, the gun goes boom" but with excellent consistency. I personally use this technique for slow fire drills and typically[wink] put an entire magazine into almost one hole groups. just the facts. this has also helped with more rapid fire as well.

+1 on this technique and +1 on dry fire practice. The pros and Jim [wink] always advise dry fire practice and it has improved my shooting, in all aspects, tremendously.
 
I want my shot to break exactly when I want it to, why would I want it to be a surprise? When the sights are on target, the gun goes boom.

Because, if you try to break the shot instantly when the sights are on the target, you'll tend to disturb the sigts in the process. Of course you need to do it quickly to shoot fast, but even Brian Enos talks about there being a few hundredths variation.
 
Because, if you try to break the shot instantly when the sights are on the target, you'll tend to disturb the sigts in the process. Of course you need to do it quickly to shoot fast, but even Brian Enos talks about there being a few hundredths variation.

Not if you have proper trigger control. TGO and TJ slap the trigger, they don't disrupt the sights.

Reading BE's next paragraph on timing
"There you are timing the shot so its breaks the instant the gun hits the targets scoring surface"

"Each shot must break no sooner or no later than its possibly able to"

if call your shots, then you can't flinch.
 
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"Surprise Break" seems like a funny concept to me. I know when the gun is going to go off, more or less. Especially when running something like a 1911, or a revolver in SA mode, you pretty much know when the gun is going to fire. The only time I ever get anything resembling a surprise break, is if I'm slow firing a DA revolver or a DAO pistol. Even then, after enough shooting, your brain pretty much knows when the gun is going off, after you pull the trigger past the "point of no return".

To me, flinching or jerking of the trigger can be a few things-

-subconcious anticipation or "fear" of the gun firing- most of this is the whole "getting used to having a 25,000+ PSI explosion occur right in front
of your face" factor. (not to drift too far, but trying to keep your eyes open while firing, is also part of this- a lot of folks blink during firing, which I would guess plays a role somehow. )

-some subconcious attempt at preemptively controlling recoil- eg, some folks think they have to apply extra muscular effort to attempt to "control"
the gun when it fires instead of just letting it recoil on its own accord.

-simple overapplication of force to the trigger at the desired time. This can be caused by a whole bunch of things- attempting to shoot faster than
your brain/muscles are capable of, "performance anxiety" - eg, letting your fundamentals go to hell because you're trying to make up for what you think is lost time; or even just plain old fatigue - when you get tired, or are tired mentally or physically, people tend to get sloppy. It's easy to slap the hell out of the trigger when fatigued.

I think newbies get hit hardest with the first two, and then the rest of us have problems with the third, which is (mostly) overcome by lots of training and muscle memory type stuff; and some of it is mental conditioning. (Call me crazy, but I find pre-visualization to be a valuable skill- eg, think of what you WANT to happen when performing the course of fire before you start, and your brain might, to some degree, "make it so".

The third one also seems to be caused by going faster than you're actually capable of shooting. Sometimes you have to push this envelope to increase
speed, but you have to balance speed vs accuracy- eg- how long do I let the sights settle vs how quickly should I pull the trigger? A "controlled slap" will work for many shots... of course the success rate is going to vary depending on the shooters acquired skills.

The third factor also gets worse the worse the trigger is. For example, I find discrete control of something like a halfway decent 1911 trigger far
easier to manage than most DA/SA triggers in SA mode (with some limited exceptions). Of course, up to a point, technique can overcome problems with even the crappier triggers. A good shooter can shoot decent even with a mediocre trigger; but once you go into terrible land (like the stock MA M+P trigger) the job gets a LOT harder.

I'm probably all washed up/FOS, but that's how it "feels" to me. I'm no handgunning guru by ANY stretch of the imagination, but this is the kind of
things I've felt when combating flinching and the like. I find dry fire exercises to be extremely valuable, if done right.

-Mike
 
having the shot go off as a surprise may work all well and good for someone who is just taking up shooting, and getting to learn the feel for a gun. But there comes a time when you need to advance way past being surprised when the gun goes off, and you need to know exactly when that gun is going to shoot. Once you get there, if you're ever surprised the gun went off, you did something wrong.

One would do well to heed the advice from Supermoto, he's accomplished more competitively in the few years I've known him, and advanced faster, than the majority of shooters ever will.
 
One would do well to heed the advice from Supermoto, he's accomplished more competitively in the few years I've known him, and advanced faster, than the majority of shooters ever will.

My only concern is how applicable his advice is to relatively new shooters. I only fired my first shot about two years ago. I know when I was getting started the surprise break concept helped me a great deal.

My gut says that a crawl/walk/run style progression for newbies is good idea, but I'm not absolutely tied to it. Supermoto, what would you teach someone who's never fired a pistol before on their first trip to the range? (I want to make it clear that I'm not attacking you here, I truly want to learn.)

I'm aware of the concept of the focus and trigger control being dictated by what you need to make the shot. I just think, for newer shooters, this is a hard front sight focus and smooth surprise break for every shot.
 
I have never understood the 'surprise' training advice. If I'm 'surprised' by anything - I'm startled. And if I'm startled, I jump. That doesn't translate to trigger control to me. I need to feel my trigger. And know exactly when it's going to go 'boom'. The only time I've ever really been 'surprised' when the gun fired is when I'm trying a totally new gun with a totally different trigger pull than what I'm used to. And on any gun, after I've fired it a few times, I can't help but know when it reaches the point of firing and how it feels from start to finish, so how do you maintain that element of 'surprise'? You can't help but know that feel of your trigger unless you have a trigger that varies from pull to pull, and then, I think you should get your gun fixed! Kinda like when I'm driving my car - when I step on my brakes, I don't want to be 'surprised' that my car stops. I really think it's more about physical control and developing that. I think Dr.G is saying pretty much the same thing???

I have a long way to go and still a lot to learn in the competition shooting arena so I may be off base here but it's just my 2cents.

(And if any of you ever watched a video of Supermoto shooting, you'd see that 38 Super speaks the truth. He's a good person to learn from. As a matter of fact - you should watch a video of Matt shooting too, if you want to be totally awed as I am whenever I watch these guys shoot)

Donna
 
The way to learn trigger control is by using slow pressure until the shot breaks. Any other way and you end up jerking the trigger. Once you've got that down, you learn to gradually do it faster. (Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.) You won't know exactly when it's going to break, but you'll know close enough for any practical purpose. Cooper described it as a "compressed, surprise break".

Ken
 
Surprise Break

The whole key to shooting well is to have the gun fire without disturbing the sight picture. With that said, I have no doubt that Supermoto can do this well. Supermoto is only the second person that I have heard state that a surprise break is not the best way to shoot. The other is a highly decorated Navy Seal. This Seal also says that the surprise break is a definitely a valid technique. I agree with Supermoto that calling your shots is a major skill that must be mastered.

When we teach, we always stress that there is no single way to shoot both accurately and fast.
The best way is the way the works for you every time that you need it.
 
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