CHAPTER IV

THE WRONG WAY TO LEARN

Pistol practice varies in different countries.

As duelling is still general on the Continent, practice with the pistol is conducted differently to that customary in the United States or England.

On the Continent most men of the upper cla.s.ses have at least a rudimentary acquaintance with the foil and duelling pistol, but in the English-speaking nations a man has rarely ever handled or even seen a duelling pistol, or the few who have done pistol shooting have never shot except at a stationary bull's-eye target.

At the English National Rifle a.s.sociation at Bisley, the attempt was made to induce men to practise at moving, rapid-firing, and disappearing targets, as well as advancing and retiring ones, but these had reluctantly one by one to be given up, owing to there being so few men who cared to shoot in such compet.i.tions.

In the days when I used to compete regularly at Bisley, I do not think there were more than half a dozen of us who competed at the sliding target, and even fewer at the rapid-firing one.

We, in those days, used revolvers and black powder, which made such shooting very difficult owing to the smoke obscuring the target.

I give at the end of this book the best targets, full size, made in these compet.i.tions which will now remain permanently the best on record, as the revolver and ammunition are no longer made. They will rank with the "High Wheel" trotting records as "Hors Concours."

Any one who wishes to compete in revolver-shooting compet.i.tions in England must modify my teaching in the preceding chapters, and refer to my _Art of Revolver Shooting_ for details of compet.i.tion.

The duelling pistol is not used in England, but there are many revolvers still in use there; England is the last country to use the revolver in the army, and is the last refuge of the revolver, just as Yellowstone Park is the last refuge of the buffalo.

For compet.i.tion in England, practising will have to be done with a revolver, not an automatic pistol, and a deliberate aim taken at a black bull's-eye on a white target.

In the United States, the automatic pistol is the sole weapon now. Several Challenge Trophies, which I modelled and presented to various a.s.sociations, have had to have their conditions altered to "automatic pistols" from "revolvers," and as the automatic inevitably tends to rapid shooting, the days of stationary target shooting are numbered.

Many people defend shooting at a stationary target, on the plea that one must learn one's alphabet before learning to read.

This is correct _as far as it goes_, but they carefully omit to add that after a boy has learned his alphabet, he goes on to reading, and writing.

He does not merely repeat his alphabet all his life.

Just the same argument is used by those who say that blundering through Greek and Latin, with the help of a dictionary, teaches modern languages; that these latter are "so easy after a grounding in Latin and Greek."

If it is so easy why do they not learn modern languages. They cannot speak a word of any language but their own, and even the few sentences of Latin and Greek they can parrot-like repeat, no foreigner can understand, as they p.r.o.nounce them with the English vowel sounds. For the same reason they misp.r.o.nounce all foreign names.

A Russian who cannot speak French and German as well as his own language is considered entirely uneducated.

A man may be a crack shot at a stationary target and yet be absolutely useless with his pistol in case of having to use it in a hurry at anything in motion.

If you want to learn something, learn it, do not learn another thing, so as to be prepared to learn something else later on, _if_ you care to.

If you want to eat a peach do not first drink ten plates of soup, and eat a leg of mutton, or you may not have the time or desire to eat the peach.

If you want to learn practical pistol shooting, learn it, do not waste time learning unpractical shooting.

You not only waste your _time_, but you spoil your "_timing_," which is the great thing in pistol shooting, and also your sense of direction. You get into the habit of putting up your pistol and then searching for the bull's-eye, instead of having it all come by instinct, like putting your spoon into your mouth.

I can tell a man who is not a practical shot, by the way he first finds his sights, and then hunts round for the target with them. If it were a live target, it would have made itself scarce while he was searching for his sights.

CHAPTER V

PRELIMINARY INFORMATION

In revolver shooting there was the danger of making a bad shot through a badly fitted or dirty cylinder not turning quite into place, and causing a shaving of lead to be taken off the bullet as it pa.s.sed into the barrel.

I was once trying a new pattern revolver, and made a very bad shot, although I knew I had let-off well. I opened the revolver, and a thin shred of lead fell out, showing the bullet had been deformed as it entered the barrel.

A bad shot from such a cause cannot happen to an automatic or a single-shot pistol.

A near-sighted man is at more disadvantage in pistol shooting than in rifle shooting.

With a rifle the hind sight can be fixed to the barrel nearer, or further from the eye until it is at just the right distance to suit the shooter.

The pistol must be held at the full stretch of the arm, or else one will get a blow on the nose, and will not be able to hold steadily.

A long-sighted man can continue pistol shooting without having to wear gla.s.ses long after he has to use them for reading.

A near-sighted man finds the hind sight too far for him to see it clearly, and then makes the fatal mistake of shooting with a bent arm.

This not only prevents accurate shooting, but he is very apt to get the hind sight into his eye from the recoil of a kicking automatic.

The arm should be held straight and extended to full stretch, so as to point the pistol by sense of direction, just as a well-fitting shotgun stock enables the shooter to aim without consciously paying any attention to the sights.

Use the pistol exactly as you would use a shotgun. It is this want of knowledge of shotgun shooting which makes men shoot a pistol as if it were a rifle being used at a stationary target.

These men only understand lying down with a rifle, and poking about with the sights to find the target after they have put the rifle to their shoulder. Some have a lot of incantations first; they aim at the sky, bring the rifle down slowly, and then make a bull's-eye on the wrong target as they naturally cannot know which is theirs of a string of targets, if they only fish about looking through a pin hole for it; they know nothing of the possibilities of a rifle or pistol, unless they are shotgun shooters as well.

The public consider "I did not know it was loaded" as ample and full excuse when one man shoots another in a so-called "accident."

Not to know if the firearm you are handling is loaded is _an unpardonable crime_. It is so simple to open the firearm and see for yourself. I never take the owner's word for it if he tells me a firearm is not loaded.

Before I handle it, I examine it for myself.

The public think that no one but an expert can possibly know if a firearm is loaded; that the only way to know is to pull the trigger, and if any one happens to be shot, well, that is unavoidable and n.o.body is to blame.

It is to try to partly remedy this danger (it is impossible to make any firearm or instruction in its use "fool-proof") that I ask any one who takes up this book to read the two following chapters, even if they take no interest in shooting. It may save a life.

Everything we do is a compromise, and nothing human can be made perfect in all particulars.

I give my ideas of what is wanting in automatics, not from a mechanic's point of view, but from that of the one who has to shoot them.

Few mechanics are shooting experts. They make beautiful pistols from a mechanical point of view, but which are clumsy and unpractical from the shooter's point of view.