Who doesn’t wish they could shoot more accurately? Whether your goal is to improve your scoring in competition or fill a game bag, here are some top tips on shooting more accurately that nearly anyone can put into practice, regardless of discipline.
1. Focus on your sights
You aim with your sights; you need to use them. If you’re shooting over open sights, focus on the front sight. If you’re shooting with an optic, focus on the reticle or dot.
Float the front sight, dot or reticle over the target, focus on it, and squeeze the trigger.
2. Get familiar with “acceptable wobble”
Unless you’re shooting from a benchrest (and to a degree, even if you are) your rifle or handgun will wobble a little bit. It’s just not possible to keep a gun completely, perfectly still.
Therefore, get familiar with the term “acceptable wobble.” It refers to how much your sights drift across the target. Acceptable wobble is half the perceived, apparent width or height of the target. Any more than this is too much; don’t shoot.
Work to minimize wobble while recognizing that you can’t entirely eliminate it, then practice breaking the trigger at the conceptual moment your point of aim intersects your intended point of impact.
3. Read the wind
The larger, heavier, and slower a bullet is, and the lower its ballistic coefficient, the more it will be affected by wind drift. There’s no easy way to tell how much, on any given day, a bullet will travel as a result of drift, but be aware of the wind and read your groups so you can anticipate the effect of wind on your shots - then “hold to the side” as you’d hold over to anticipate drift as you’d do for drop.
4. Pause, but don’t hold, your breath
Your breathing and heartbeat will both make your handgun or rifle wobble and tremor just a little bit. There are two schools of thought for how to minimize this impact.
One is to pause your breath before you shoot - but the key here is to pause, not to hold it for too long. Shoot within two seconds of pausing.
The other is to shoot naturally at a low point in your respiratory cycle, specifically at the point at which you’ve fully exhaled and there’s no air left in your lungs. Before you take your next breath, break the trigger.
5. Hold the pistol properly
For those of you shooting with a handgun, make sure you get a good grip on the gun. This means high and tight - you want your grip as high on the gun as the frame will allow without interfering with the cycling of the slide, and as much surface area contact between your grip and the gun as possible.
This is a topic we’ve covered at length before; see our previous post, Get a Grip: How to Hold a Handgun, and Why It Matters.
6. But kill the death grip on your rifle
The opposite maxim applies here; ideally, when shooting a rifle, you shouldn’t be contacting the gun at all. A strong grip on a rifle is almost certain to torque the sights off your intended target, causing your groups to become less consistent.
When shooting over a rest or bipod, lightly place your hand over the grip and avoid using your support hand on the forend if you can. The less pressure you exert on the rifle, the better.
7. Use a match-grade ammo for the application
For long-range shooting, ammo quality matters. For long-range shooting, consider a match-grade ammo such as Federal’s Gold Medal Match ammo. Federal Gold Medal Match is loaded with open-tip match (OTM) Sierra MatchKing bullets, which offer higher radial symmetry, thereby making them more accurate especially at greater ranges.
For close-range handgunning, especially at paper targets, consider shooting flat nose bullets, also known as wadcutters, which punch clean, round holes through paper targets. While they won’t make you shoot more accurately, they will streamline scoring.
8.With a shotgun: lead and follow through
For shotgunners, two of the biggest reasons for misses are failure to lead and failure to follow through. If you break the trigger at the exact second that the bead contacts your target, the shot string will fall behind it, and if you fail to follow through, the same thing will happen.
Regardless of which direction the target is crossing, make sure to break the trigger when the bead is just at the leading edge of the target, and keep the shotgun moving through the swing. Never stop the swing short.
Follow these two practices and you’ll break more clays and bag more birds.
Practice Makes Better: Put in the Time
Whether you’re here to stock up on some 9mm full metal jacket for range training or Federal Gold Medal Match grade ammo, remember, it’s the time you put in at the range that matters. Get out there, be safe, and get some shooting in.