Sunday, January 10, 2016

Sunday Family Shoot

No pics today, and not much shooting.  Only one grandson here that was shooting age, and I took him out and worked with him on the range.  PawPaw never strapped a pistol today.

Grandson is right-handed, but left-eye dominant.  He loves to shoot, and when I introduced him to long guns, we decided that he should shoot from the left side.  He adopted that and shoots rifles and shotguns from the left side.  This is both correct and proper.  Long gun shooting depends on the dominant eye.  Even with handguns shooting when using sights, it's proper to use the dominant eye, but with reactive shooting, (and CFDA-type shooting is reactive), we don't use sights.

Fast Draw shooting is what I call "rip-it-and-trip-it".  When the revolver comes out of the holster, as soon as you feel like the barrel is aligned, you trip the trigger.  I've had long-time shooters tell me that most of the time, they don't even see the revolver, it's so low at the belt line.  It's all muscle-memory and practice.  Most of the time I see the revolver, but it's low in my peripheral vision.  There is certainly no sight alignment.

This particular grandson has Asperger's syndrome.  He's a great kid, but this syndrome has its challenges.  One of them, is that once he's made up his mind, it's made up.  He doesn't see gray areas, only stark, black-and-white choices.  As he's shot with us over the past year, I've noticed that he tends to strap up with a left-handed holster, because he believes that he should shoot from the left side.

That's okay, but he's naturally right-handed and his pistol handling always looked awkward.  So, today I strapped him with a double-holster rig, and told him I wanted to conduct an experiment.  So, we'd shoot a few cartridges from the left, then a couple of cartridges from the right.  We worked on his  draw.  No electronics, just he and I shooting the revolver at the target.  After switching back and forth a few times, he decided that he was probably a little bit faster from his right side than his left, so we did some more shooting.

After we put the revolvers back in the gun-rugs, we sat on the deck and talk ed a bit about the difference between the Ruger revolvers and the Colt clones.  The pros and cons of each system, and why each was designed the way it is.  He's not sure yet which system he likes better, and I agree with him that they each have their drawbacks; their strengths and weakensses.

But, on the bottom line, I was privileged to spend an hour shooting with one of my grandsons, talking about guns, and shooting, and pros and cons of differing systems.  It was a very pleasant hour.  We made progress and we enjoyed each other's company, and I'm very pleased that we were able to do that.

3 comments:

David said...

The best shooting is shooting with family.

Old NFO said...

That's a keeper of a day! :-)

Retired Spook said...

You win the internets for the weekend! Have a grandson like that, and when you can connect with them, it's like sunshine!!!!

Congratulations on scoring big this weekend!