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Something interesting has been happening the past few weeks.

As anyone who visits this blog on a regular basis may have noticed, I haven’t been writing much. Initially this was due to “the bug” that was making its way through seemingly everyone in my extended family. The grandbaby had it, her parents, we got it, the grandaughter and her family then had it, then my wife developed a pneumonia ‘cause she wasn’t quite over it after all … And through all that, I wasn’t doing much shooting, just a lot of reloading and dreaming.

Heretofore, I’ve picked up 45 ACP empties at the indoor range I use in Scottsdale AZ. The ROs have even been so kind to sweep empties from others in my direction (after the other shooters have left) because they had observed me doing so. Over many weeks and months, then, I’ve accumulated quite a collection.

On Sunday 25 December 2005 09:58, Ed Hall said (on the Bullseye-L mailing list), “It doesn’t happen that everything is perfect if we do it by the numbers. We also have to realize that this takes time to develop.”

I tried a slight modification to the approach I recently wrote about. Specifically, although I still try to release all thoughts and self-talk during a shot, after I’ve released the shot and lowered the gun, that’s when I do something different.

In the movie, Bull Durham, Tim Robbin’s character discovers that when he doesn’t think, he pitches better – a lot better. But knowing and doing are two different things. Indeed, after a couple of good pitches, Tim Robbin’s character gets cocky, starts thinking about what he’s throwing, and blows it.

Last Sunday night, after shooting the 50 foot targets for the NRA Postal where my unofficial score was 534-6 out of 600-40 (there is no X ring in the two 50 foot Slow Fire targets) with a 96-3 on one of the Rapid Fire targets – not too shabby for this Marksman – a couple of the shooters stuck around for an hour of air pistol.

“Yeah, maybe he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?”

Bullseye, or NRA Conventional Pistol, is a shooting at paper targets competition. Competitors stand side-by-side and fire at their respective targets from a variety of distances and with one or more different guns. Competitions can be brief and finished in a couple of hours, or span several days and include hundreds of shooters assigned to different squads (for scheduling purposes).

Here are some less-than-obvious values to good equipment.

• The bullet goes where the gun was aimed when the hammer was released.

That should be obvious but, as a beginner I knew my wobble was much worse than the inaccuracy of the gun. My “off the shelf” Springfield Armory “Mil-Spec” 1911 (the Parkerized version) would shoot a 6-8" group at 50 yards. That was good enough for scores of 8, 9, 10 and X. Pretty good.

“Coach Pat,” Patrick Dolan, passed away last Friday, October 22, 2005.