Target Practice

Its been a while since I last had a moment to do any target practice. Before everyone starts to worry, I do a lot of Airsofting (so not using lethal firearms) and as part of that I try to train regularly in my garden. Its useful to sight in the weapons as well as improve snap and aimed shooting. The last time I did this however was way back in November so understandably I was a bit rusty.

There are a number of different ways in which I practice shooting but the most common were the three ways I practiced today. I use a simple target (which I built myself) which stands 1.2m high and uses an A4 sheet of paper with a target the size of a person’s head.

First of all, the fairly pedestrain - standing carefully aimed ten round single.

You can see the effect of the wind which was weak to average left to right. Also I have developed a bad habit of over-squeezing the trigger when firing which can be seen in the spread. Overall it is a good spread and I was glad to see I have not lost much from the last few months of inactivity.

The second exercise is a bit more useful for airsofting. It involves standing ten yards away and facing 90 degrees from the target. Every five seconds rotate 90 degrees (body AND feet) and fire a three round burst with minimal time for aiming. This tests and trains the snap shot and is most commonly used by airsofters.

As you can see, I didn’t do as well here as before although at least one shot from each burst hit the inner (darker) rings. There appear to have been two misses although I heard all the rounds hitting the target.

Lastly, the hardest test of the day, run five feet parallel to the target, rotate 90 degrees and fire three rounds. This is repeated three times.

 

This is the hardest test as it gets the heart pumping and makes it much harder to align your sights as you spin around as you are concentrating on your foot work as well as stopping. Predictably I did the worst on this one with two complete misses, although the target is the size of a Man’s head, so if aiming center mass would still have represented ‘kills.’ Each target is numbered to indicate which burst it came from. As you can see, my third burst was the worst with two very poor hits.

Laptop Gun V2

And they say the real world is stranger than fiction - certainly in this case, it is! Many will remember the Laptop Gun from Perfect Dark on the n64, a compact automatic with a good rate of fire. What separated this fictional gun into a category of its own was that it could be deployed into a fixed turret to provide automated fire-support. It featured at number 6 (~2:30) in the GameTrailers top 10 guns of all time.

My only regret was that you could only throw one at a time (and that it only had 50rounds.) Now fast forward to 2008, more specifically the MagPul Industries demo at Shotshow 2008.

I gave the game away a bit by the introduction, but I hope you were as surprised as I was to see this ‘torch’ unfold. Now, if they could just build in an automated sentry feature….

The ‘Mighty Hammer’

Happy New Year! I came across this youtube video today introducing what is being touted as the next generation in CQC weaponry - the AA12 shotgun. Like most people, when asked what I would consider to be a great CQC rifle I would envisage a short m4 variant or a P90 ( ) however this new shotgun blows me away…