Bond James Bond! Action movies are probably the most popular genre that I enjoy watching. The good guys come scaling down the walls with pinpoint accuracy to take out the bad guys. The movies make shooting guns seem so easy, point and shoot its as easy as that. So is shooting really as easy as in the movies? Recently I had to a chance to test my shooting skills at the target range. I was shooting a Springfield .40SW XDM. This was actually the first time I had shot this gun, so I was curious to see how it would shoot.
Shooting handguns is relatively new for me. I have shot guns before, but this is the first time I have actually owned a handgun.
Shooting a handgun is a bit different than I thought it would be. On tv the actors have no problem shooting the bad guys at 50 yards away and making a kill shot with one bullet. My first experience was nothing like the movies.
However I did shoot better than I thought I would. One of the things that helped me was a correction shooting shot by Cedar Post Pawn.
This particular gun holds 16 rounds so I decided that I would shoot to see what felt natural to me and then make adjustments after I shot 8 shots. One of the things that was most interesting to me was the recoil. I am used to shooting rifles so recoil wasn’t new, but unlike rifles, handguns snap the front-end of the gun in the air, so anticipating recoil was a little bit different. I shot the gun at about 25 yards out. Below are the results after my first several shots.
After the first few shots I was able to get dialed in a little bit better and started shooting better. I was able to shoot better horizontally, but everything seemed to be to the left. Thanks to the correction chart I was able to see a few things that I was doing wrong. Here are a few things that I learned from my first try at shooting.
I won’t go into great detail for the proper way to shoot a handgun, however I found a great guide to follow if you are interested. http://gearpatrol.com/2014/02/11/guide-to-life-how-to-hold-and-fire-a-handgun-properly. For me I was anticipating recoil and using too little trigger finger. I made some adjustments and shot better left and right, however I started shooting high. I suppose the best way for me to correct the problems is to spend more time on the range shooting. Thanks to the correction chart from Cedar Post Pawn I will be able to make the proper adjustments. So here are the final results from the shooting range.
