| |
When doing dry-fire practice, make sure your guns are empty and there is no live ammo anywhere in the area!
There are those that will tell you to shoot accurately and the speed will come. To paraphrase Kanada Kidd from his video How to be a Master Gunfighter: "Where do they think the speed will come from? If you want to shoot fast, you have to practice shooting fast."
That said, if you can’t shoot accurately to start with, you won’t be able to do it fast either. Learn to shoot groups. Shoot small, tight groups on paper. Practice it. Don’t just shoot steel; you’ll get very sloppy. I spend some of my range time shooting 1-inch dots at 10 yards with my pistols and 25 yards with my rifle. This will focus your attention to your sights. You also have the extra benefit of finding out how your loads perform, and testing your fundamentals and sights. If you shoot a tight group that’s an inch low, then your sights need adjustment. If you can’t get a tight group, then it’s either the load or your fundamentals.
Once you can shoot groups, then you can start building up speed. But you have to do it intentionally. You will not just start to shoot faster.
There is a technique to shooting fast. I’ll outline it below:
- Get your eyes on the target. And not just on the whole target, but on a very small point at the center of the target.
- As you bring the gun in-line, you’ll pick up the front sight in your peripheral vision.
- As the gun lines up on target, shift your focus to the front sight, but shift it along the line from your eye to the center of the target. This will ensure that you remain on target.
- When you have your sight picture, break the shot. The front sight will appear to paint a line on the target with the recoil. Once the shot is away, it’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about it now, let it go and focus on the next target.
- Snap your eyes to the next target, and your gun will naturally follow.
- Repeat from step 2.
As you get better at snapping your eyes from target to target, you’ll be able to shoot faster and faster. This is a good drill to do as dry-fire with dots on the wall. Don’t put the dots in a line as this will encourage you to shoot on timing and not on the sights. If you shoot the timing, you’ll miss. If you shoot the sights, you won’t.
Shooting fast won’t happen on it’s own, you have to work at it.
There is much more to it, stance, grip, trigger control, etc. It is covered in much more detail in my latest book, Breaking the Shot. |
|
