Hit or miss. Mostly miss.

Last evening, I took a jaunt out to North Bergen NJ with Bri-guy for a pistol clinic over at the NJ Firearms Academy. There were a few familiar faces and a goodly amount of new (to me and Bri-guy) faces who as it turns out are the more regular competition shooters. We got out on the firing line, and started out with a couple boxes of 9mm, splitting time on the Glock 17.

As mentioned earlier, I'm not a huge fan of the Glock, and about 30 feet, here's my first target...


Clearly I'm doing something mostly right - those circles are about 3 inches in diameter. Except for that one guy who sort of wandered off into the lower left. Well, that little guy turned out to be my undoing. I spent the next 30 rounds of 9mm or so trying to correct that, overcorrecting, and let's just say that as soon as I started to think about it too hard, I began the downward spiral of milking the trigger, pulling off the target, anticipating the shot, and in general, not following through.

I'm not posting scans of those targets. They're embarrassing. They got better again, thanks to wise words of coaching from Trevor Dickerson. Then Bri-guy and I moved up to the Sig Sauer .40 cal pistol - an intense departure from the composite 9mm Glock. With the Sig's all steel frame and much more responsive trigger, I tended to do much better...

... again a 3 inch diameter circle at about 30 feet. With a more solid weapon despite the recoil I did some decent shooting. It wasn't long before my bad habits came up again, but I controlled them far better. Less side to side wavering and more of an up-down issue.

I did have a tendency to shoot a bit low though...


The total diameter of this target is about 8 inches.

Those two shots up top are from Trevor, who was helping me get a better read on why I was pulling low. In fact, the order of placement starts low and tends to get much closer to the center of the target.

All in all, clearly I've my work cut out for me before I can consider myself even a mediocre shooter as compared to men and women (yes, Virgina there are ladies who can bullseye a target at 50 feet one handed with a .45) who are on the NJFA competition team.

Then again - I don't feel too bad about this outing. For my second legitmate pistol experience, I think I did pretty well all in all. And frankly, had these been zombies, they'd all be dead. I mean dead-dead, not undead.

But for the record, Bri-guy's final magazine of the .40 caliber resulted in what I'd definitely call a tight grouping... he put six rounds through about a 1 inch pattern. We could tell it was legit by taking a spent casing and matching it up around the edges. It was, quite a sight to see, I assure you.