Bullseye

This evening, I came home to what was supposed to be an empty house.

For the past several years, I’ve been tasked with taking pictures of the Desert Midwinter competition in Phoenix and I’ve learned a couple of things others might find helpful.

• It’s hard but can be done. The 7X target seen here was accomplished at the national championships in 2013. Looking at it two years later, I see only the 7Xs. I don’t see the 9, the 8 nor the 7. The person scoring this said, “Nice target!”
• Upper-body strength is helpful with grip and wrist even more so but anyone can shoot an X, sometimes a lot of them.
• For myself and many others, the attraction is more about the camaraderie with others than the targets, the guns or the shooting.
• While it doesn’t have to be expensive, for most, Bullseye is not a cheap sport. As with other sports, the more you do it, the better you get, but unlike baseball, tennis or golf where you can use the same ball all day, when the gun goes “Bang!”, you’ve spent the bullet.
• Bullseye shooters, if they stay with the sport, will reload their own ammunition, and do so for two reasons: first, each round is less expensive so they can shoot more, and secondly because they can tune the ammunition to a specific handgun for maximum accuracy.
• Safety is paramount. If you forget and then hear someone complaining about what you just did, you will probably survive. Hopefully so will all of those around you. There’s no kidding around in this regard. None. Zero.
• Most Bullseye shooters are politically conservative and, perhaps more so, libertarian in their overall leanings, but neither of those tendencies are universal.
• Most Bullseye shooters are smart and relatively successful in life. And again while this is not universal, it is much more so than the previous generalization.
• When taken as a whole, these observations may help explain why Bullseye or Conventional Pistol or Precision Pistol, depending on what you choose to call it, is a somewhat exclusive, some say elitist, sport.

You cock it with the handle and then “fire” a single chuff of air. A hand at the end of the barrel would feel the air but 12" farther out you’d hardly notice. Regardless, it made a nice loud “Bang!”

Image by permission and courtesy of Lagniappe’s Lair.

Easier said than done?

Well, this process is what Bullseye shooters do to develop a successful shot plan: We write the steps down, follow those steps and, when something doesn’t work, we figure out how to change that shot plan so we do it right. And then we write down the new shot plan and follow it.

On April 1st, Jim Henderson wrote on Facebook: