Welcome to E D Skinner's Website

I travel for a living. My job often sends me out on a Monday and home again on Friday but sometimes there’s a Sunday “out” or a Saturday “back” day. As such, it’s difficult for me to shoot the Tuesday evening Nighthawks here in Phoenix. Worse, I often miss the once-a-month 2700s on Sundays when an outbound leg starts with a mid-afternoon flight.

The Learning Process takes place in a couple of radically different phases.

I’ve made some good progress this year.

• In my 2006 New Year’s resolution I said that “it will be nice to climb out of the Marksman ranks this year” and, effective 05/23/2006, I formally started competing in the Sharpshooter classification as per the NRA.
• My 22 scores are up about 5 points over the year, from the upper 80s to the low-to-middle 90s range, from Sharpshooter to comfortably in the Expert range.
• Shooting of the wad gun (CF and 45) is improved almost 5%, from just barely Sharpshooter to the high side of that classification.
• My aggregate scores in 2700s are up a full 10%, partly owing to the oddities of statistical averaging and partly to the scarcity of 2700s as opposed to our weekly league.
• And most significant, my efforts on the ball gun are paying off: scores are up a full 10% (from 65-75% to 75-85%).

For the coming year, I plan to continue my primary focus on the ball gun because last year’s intention of “choosing to earn the new classification primarily on that more difficult gun” (the wad gun at that time, now the ball gun) has shown that focused and regimented practice with the hardest gun helps in all my shooting.

For what it may be worth, I learned something unexpected in dry-fire. Whether or not I need to keep that lesson or if it was just a stepping stone along the way, I don’t know.

The Problem

After loading several hundred rounds of ammunition not too long ago, I then discovered that two primers had been seated sideways and one upside down. I removed the bullets and recovered the powder but decided to discard the shells with their damaged primers. But since the primers were still live, I wondered what should I do to deactivate them?

I tested my two 1911s, the ball gun and the wadder, on a Ransom Rest today. My primary goal was to confirm or deny my suspicions of one, and to have the other as a reference to give credibiliity to the overall results.

I’ve been concentrating on the 45 hardball gun for several weeks (seems like months) and other than two 900s per month on the 22 and 45 wad gun, I’ve been shooting almost nothing else. I probably shoot 4X as much hardball as anything else right now, all on the theory that shooting the more difficult gun will teach me more and, in turn, help the other guns.

For Bullseye 2700s that last all day (typically 8:30AM to about 3:00PM) I have adopted a very specific diet. Several other local shooters seem to do about the same and also Brian Zins, the seven times US pistol shooting champion from whom I’m admittedly borrowing much of this advice, has mentioned a very similar diet for the day of competition. Please note, however, that I’ve adapted all this to the perceived dictates of my own metabolism. (YMMV.)

When we do anything dangerous such as shooting guns, reloading ammunition or jumping out of airplanes, it is very helpful to have *several* overlapping things that, any one of which, will prevent or catch an otherwise fatal mistake. For example, the NRA has three safety rules for shooting, each one of which will keep you from shooting yourself or anyone around you. Indeed, to hurt someone, you have to fail at all three rules simultaneously.