Back in the early days of my career, I was the outdoor reporter for a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. I actually got paid to go hunting and fishing every day. Can you believe that? Now, I get to do this! You know, I’ve had a pretty good career. But I digress.
Back in the days when I was shooting shotguns at flying pheasants, a couple of my outdoor writer buddies and I coined a series of terms that precisely described our shooting skills. The term most often applied to my wingshooting ability was that I suffered from “accuracy trauma.”
As a result, I became adept at coming up with excuses to explain why my shot string did not connect with a bird in flight. Some of my personal favorites included the following:
New boots. I would say something to the effect of, “It’s tough to swing the gun effectively with these new boots. They are not broken in yet and tend to inhibit my swing.”
Wrong choke tube. Even though it was only a few thousandths of an inch difference, I could make a case for a clean miss by stating that what I needed was a modified choke. “This improved modified choke tube leaves some holes in the pattern at that range.”
Old boots. Depending on who I was with and the number of shots I missed, I could always say, “These old boots just don’t offer the support they used to. That makes it tough to swing smoothly on birds going to my right.”
Tough birds. Fire two shots, then say, “It’s amazing they can keep flying when they are shot right through the heart like that.”
What Does This Have to Do with Anything?
Let’s bring this back around to pistol shooting, by way of common human actions. Most of us will practice what we are good at. We don’t want to practice the items at which we often fail because witnessing our own failure is no fun. We want success. We want to see our own success and we want others to see our success.
We can and do make many excuses for why we don’t train; why we flinch; why we pull our shots to the right or push them to the left. On the range with our friends we can laugh and joke about accuracy trauma, assume the posture of a Drill Sergeant, and shout, “You’re jerking the trigger!” Then everyone will laugh.
But let’s stop laughing for a minute.
We are talking about training for a potential gunfight. Accuracy trauma could lead to real trauma—possibly your own or, worse yet, to an unintended target.
Let’s stop making excuses about why we don’t train enough; why we can’t always shoot straight. Let’s make sure we are doing what we need to do to save lives when the time comes.
