TrapShoo&ngUSA

TrapShootingUSA – March/April 2021 Lots of interesting articles this month. One on an indoor trap range in Diamond, Illinois near where I grew up. Believe me, could have used that place in December and January! The article on Loral I. Delaney by K arla Harrison is a good read. I remember going to the Sportsman Show in Chicago as a kid and watching Loral I. perform with her trained Labradors. I knew her from seeing her at the Grand American back in the 70’s. Last time I saw her she was at Markham Park, but that was over ten years ago. Nice lady and great outdoors Lady and shooter. Sean Hawley reviews two books I haven’t read: The Complete Shot by Shane Bisgood and a golfing book, 7 STROKES IN 7 DAYS by Dawn Grant. If someone has read these books let me know if they were helpful to your shooting. You might not know it but finding books on shooting is an expensive enterprise these days. Most books are out of print and are only available used. Their prices are exorbitant. I purchased most of my books used over five years ago and have added only a few in recent years. Most of them were less than $10 each back then. The same books run $50 or more now!

Shooting Sportsman – March/April 2021 Chris Batha gives a short treatise this month on the eyes and their importance to hitting a moving target. After you’ve established the fundamentals of a pre-shot routine of stance, posture, head position, and a consistent mount we next build the skill required to determine angle, speed, and distance of a target in flight. Angle, speed, and distance establishes our foot position in relation to where we decide on the insertion point and break point. It’s the eyes that are the next important issue. Focus on the target to the exclusion of all else. If our fundamentals are wellestablished there should be no conscious regard to them. The target is all we are conscious of. Chris likens this to tunnel vision on the target, being in the zone or concentrated focus on the task at hand. If our fundamentals are good our move to the target will be smooth and consistent regardless of the presentation. The longer you focus on the target the “smoother and more effortless” will be the move to the break point. As a side note, Chris reminds us to use proper glasses with the correct lens tint. The trade-off on tint, more light that enters the eye the better the definition of the target. Proper shooting glasses allow for the forward tilt of our head to the gun and are designed to accommodate the lens position to our eyes correctly. Use proper shooting glasses to get the best affect for your eyes.

Tom Roster dives into the myth of the perfect 30” pattern this month. Everyone has probably gone to a patterning board at least once in their life and patterned their gun. It’s not something I do very often. I had a new Beretta 682 once and immediately realized I had a problem with the top barrel. Turns out it shot 100% low. Beretta was nice enough

about it. They gave me a new set of barrels. This article is about that perfect 30” pattern with no holes for the target to fly through. According to Tom, this perfect pattern doesn’t exist and he details why. The cloud of shotgun pellets that leave your barrel do not fan out and arrive at the patterning board all at one time. They form a string or cloud in the same way a comet and its tail appear in the night sky. Some pellets are going to arrive later than others. This means the target flies through a cloud of pellets. Some targets are hit by the head of the cloud, some are hit by the tail. There aren’t really holes that can be accurately determined by a two-dimensional pattern on a sheet of paper. The shot cloud will always have holes between pellets where a target can pass

through unharmed. The speed of the pellets and the cloud make it unlikely a target will pass unscathed through your pattern. There may not be any pellets passing through the space where your target is at the exact moment it meets the cloud, but trailing pellets are bound to hit the target before it leaves the three-dimensional space the cloud occupies. Don’t pattern for the perfect shot distribution, pattern to see where your gun is shooting. Perfect patterns simply don’t exist.