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Not Blinking & Calling the Shot, again...


benos

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I had an email conversation with a friend on shot calling and thought I’d put it up here in case it helps anyone on the forums.

 

NOT BLINKING

If you blink when the shot fired you cannot call that shot. So not blinking while you are shooting is vital.

 

Have a friend to stand beside you and watch your aiming eye to confirm that you are not blinking as the gun fires. After he confirms that you are not blinking, that will give you the confidence to know what it feels like to know on your own that you are not blinking.

  

CALLING THE SHOT

The shooter must learn, on every target at any distance, what he saw when the shot fired - to KNOW that the bullet hit the intended target.

 

Some basic examples, using the A-zone of an IPSC target as the "target"…

 

What you need to SEE and KNOW at:

 

5 yards - That the slide (or the sights) is pointed in the target.

10 yards - A "rough" sight alignment inside the target (you are seeing the sights but not necessarily clearly or "stopped”).

15 yards - A clear focus on the front site - with the sight alignment stopped or paused in the center of the target.

25 yards - Same as above but with a more known, paused feeling added to a perfect, stopped sight alignment with the focus on the front sight.

50 yards - Same as above but with an even more known, paused, stopped feeling.

 

Another way to think about it… When you go down range to score the targets, if any shot is not where you were expecting it to be, you did not call that shot.

 

The bottom line with shot calling is that you have to KNOW, at the instant the shot fired, that you saw the front sight as it lifted out of the rear notch. And of course you cannot know that if you blinked. :)

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Double plugging helped me too.   I dont do it regularly anymore.  I am still not a great shot caller but I am having more and more of the "that didnt feel right" experiences.  I stil have some targets with unneeded makeup shots, but thats better than the alternative at this point.  For me, when your shooting fast it does seem to be more of a feeling  than me recalling a bad sight picture.  I guess over time you build up images in your mind of what a good/vs bad sight picture is at a distance and that gets interpreted as a feeling of something not being right, at least for me right now.

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1 minute ago, CrashDodson said:

Double plugging helped me too.   I dont do it regularly anymore.  I am still not a great shot caller but I am having more and more of the "that didnt feel right" experiences.  I stil have some targets with unneeded makeup shots, but thats better than the alternative at this point.  For me, when your shooting fast it does seem to be more of a feeling  than me recalling a bad sight picture.  I guess over time you build up images in your mind of what a good/vs bad sight picture is at a distance and that gets interpreted as a feeling of something not being right, at least for me right now.

Funny thing.  two things that helped me progress and learn to call my shots was #1 shooting PCC and #2 shooting with a dot.  I'm actually "seeing" faster now too.

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Ive been shooting with a dot now for a while as a training tool.  The dot really shows how much the gun moves, and I find its a lot easier to call shots good/bad.  We will see in a few months how it translates back to irons.  I have found I can shoot accurately while moving faster then I had thought possible.  

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a big part of my progress this last year is due to shooting a dot on my 22 for the weeknight steel matches. i became much more aware of what was going on as the gun fired. This year I'm shooting a CO gun for the steel matches, but continuing my focus on limited division for real matches.

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Highly agree with double hearing protection especially when shooting indoors. If that doesn't help calling shots then eliminate the target and just shoot into the berm or backstop and just watch the sights move. Sometimes your so focused on hitting the target that you forget your guns gunna go boom and when it does you flinch or blink. 

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I know this topic isn't necessarily a how to on not blinking when the shot is fired but blinking is an issue with me at times. I found emptying a mag into the berm and just paying attention to what the sights and slide are doing to be beneficial. Some times I'll start training sessions this way to just get the buggers out. It's an ammo eater but not calling shots is a point eater.

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On 9/3/2018 at 6:27 AM, highhope said:

It's easy to understand what is shots calling, but I think to reduce the "call time/decision time" to practical level, like 0.01s.. is the key to master it. Need to practice in dry fire and live fire. 

Ideally, the call should be simultaneous with the firing of the shot.

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47 minutes ago, benos said:

Ideally, the call should be simultaneous with the firing of the shot.

 

Yep. I had 3 targets at a hose array yesterday. Called a miss on the middle one and shot 3 shots on the next one over.  

Hands were faster than my brain. :( 

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19 hours ago, benos said:

Ideally, the call should be simultaneous with the firing of the shot.

Yes sir, but my brain and eye are not fast enough yet. Need to pay more attention to the sight picture and practice my brain to do the judgement simultaneously. 

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Sometimes I know "that" shot is low/left, right, etc.  I see the front sight is "off" when the trigger breaks.

 

Sometimes I'm sure that shot is off, and it the hole is in the group with the rest of them.  I've yet to figure out why a shot I just knew was off low/left is in the group.

 

Sometimes a shot I was sure would be in the group is off an inch or two from the group, and I have no idea why that one, that looked perfect when the trigger broke, is not in the group.

 

I know I'm not nearly as steady as I was 30 or 40 years ago, but dog gone it, sometimes the front sight is about as perfect as it get when the shot goes off and the bullet is out of the group.

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