Shooting

Shooting is an exercise of eye-hand coordination. Our ability to take our hands precisely to where our eyes are looking is a natural gift, and that gift is the basis of shooting flying. We can override it, outthink it and generally screw it up in all sorts of ways, but if we simply let our gift do what it does and not try to consciously control it, we’ll all be better shots.
I’ve written a lot about eyes and the value of visual focus, not so much about hands. But hands are half the equation. You can’t stare a target to death or grin it down like Davy Crockett, so hands have to do their part. Hands have to move the barrels along the target’s flight line, raise the gun to a good, firm mount, and pull the trigger. You can do this with only one hand, and some have learned the skill perforce. But if you have two hands, there’s no reason not to use them both.

A few years ago a pretty teenage girl was in my house along with her mother, and she got quite interested in one of my guitars, which was on a stand in the living room. Her mother said she’d been talking about learning to play. I picked up the guitar and handed it to her where she sat on a loveseat. The first thing she said was classic: “How do you hold it?” I was mightily impressed at hearing such an insightful question from one so young. Give a guitar to most people unfamiliar with it, and they’ll almost invariably support the body with their fingers at the waist and scratch at the strings with a thumb. I showed her how to hold it, taught her a couple of chords and she was off and rolling.
Thus it often is with guns. I’ve seen a lot of so-called “experienced” shots who didn’t really know how to hold a gun.
This, remember, is an effort to make best advantage of a natural gift. One of the most common—and in this case most relevant—ways we use our gift in everyday life is by pointing at things. And we all point in the same way: see something, focus on it, extend an arm to full reach, extend a forefinger and point right where we’re looking. It is supremely accurate. Even small children do this instinctively, and to my mind, just about everything small children do is instinctive. You won’t see a little kid tuck a hand under his chin, stick out a finger and yell, “Daddy, look at the pony!”
The relevance here is that we’re pre-wired to point in a certain way. Because a gun is meant to be pointed and not aimed, using what comes naturally makes the most sense. Some shooters, maybe a lot of them, seem to think they need a short hold with the leading hand—at the back of the forend, even onto the frame of a break-action or the receiver of a repeater. Some target shots argue that the short hold promotes greater barrel speed. My answer: Yes, it does, but why do you need all that speed? If your leading hand is moving faster than the target, you’d be better off using your eyes to find the right place out in front and just let your hand go to it, as it will naturally do—and do so more efficiently if your hand is more distant from your eyes.
During the 17th and 18th Centuries, gunmakers customarily made trigger guards with extremely large front bows. It seems odd to modern eyes, but there was a reason for it. In the common technique of the time, shooters brought their leading hands all the way back and actually braced them against the guard. The reason for this was purely practical. Makers still were experimenting to find just how thin they could strike barrels and achieve an optimal equilibrium between weight and strength. After some trial and grievous error, shooters decided they’d rather not be holding the barrels, lest one blow out.
David Trevallion and I had a wonderful conversation about this with Geoffrey Boothroyd one evening in Scotland. Geoff had a couple of antiques with large bow guards, and we must have spent a half-hour playing with them. The technique seems to work, but I think it far from ideal in a time when we needn’t have many qualms about grasping barrels—assuming, of course, that you’re shooting a gun that’s in current proof and not firing overloads.
My thinking is that a lot of shooters developed the short-hold habit early on by shooting guns with stocks that were too long. Bringing the leading hand back is a means of making a long stock feel shorter. (It also works the other way around; you can make a short stock feel longer by increasing the reach of your leading hand. It’s no substitute for a stock of your proper length, but it’ll do in a pinch.)
Simply put, there’s no good reason to take a short hold with your forward hand and plenty of reasons not to. It all comes back to our lovely gift of eye-hand coordination, which becomes progressively more efficient the farther the pointing hand is from the eyes.
In the Fieldsport schools we ask our students to take a comfortably extended hold—not so far out as to lock the elbow, because a locked elbow binds the shoulder muscles, but far enough to lend the feel of pointing with the leading hand. Some struggle with this at first, typically those who have a long-time habit of holding short; others catch on right from the start. We also ask them to imagine that the barrel is simply an extension of a pointing finger. If actually pointing with that forefinger helps, fine. You can extend your finger between the barrels of a side-by-side or along the side of an over/under’s forend. Doesn’t matter which. What matters is the feel of pointing.
As an aside, the shape of an over/ under’s forend can be a distraction. For my part, I find a Schnabel forend tip thoroughly annoying. I take a fairly long hold, and even though I don’t have particularly long arms, my forefinger goes right over the ridge of the Schnabel. Schnabels look cool, but the birds and the clays won’t be impressed. I want the gun to suit me rather than having to suit myself to the gun—so give me a rounded, field-style forend such as you find on the old Browning Superposed and I’ll be a happy shooter.
When we encourage a comfortably extended hold, we mean exactly that. The extension needs to suit the shooter’s size and shape, but it needs to make best possible use of eye-hand coordination. The comfort part is also a personal thing, though those with an ingrained short-hold problem often need a fair amount of practice to realize that more extension can become just as comfortable and a good deal more efficient.
You can find your comfort zone by placing the buttstock on top of your shooting-side shoulder so the barrels point straight up. Then reach up with your leading hand extended, grasp the barrels and bring the gun down. Give or take a smidgen, that extension is what will work best for you.
The trigger hand has received less attention in literature than the leading hand, but it’s just as important. The leading hand initiates the swing and guides the barrels through the shot. The trigger hand takes a subordinate role in the swing, but it completes the mount by bringing the comb of the stock crisply up to the cheekbone ledge. Anatomists call this the zygomatic arch. Call it whatever, it’s the crucial point of contact in aligning the gun and the shooter’s master eye, and the trigger hand’s job is to get the stock where it should be—not to the shoulder but to the cheekbone. Get it there and the shoulder will take care of itself.
Obviously, the position of the trigger hand is dictated by the requirement of reaching the trigger, so the nuances are more subtle but still important.
Crowding the trigger is one of the most common faults we see. This is a matter of jamming the hand against the back of the guard, and it seems to stem from a belief that the trigger blade should be in the crease of the trigger finger’s first joint. Two problems with this: One is that it impairs your ability to feel the trigger pull. Our fingers are wired in such a way that there are many more nerve endings in the tips than in the joints. Pulling with the pad of your finger promotes optimal sensitivity to the trigger’s behavior.
Crowding also jams your middle finger against the back of the guard. Recoil drives the guard against your hand, and that can hurt. It also can wear a sore on your middle finger, which hurts even more, and getting there doesn’t take all that many shots. A gun, after all, is meant to be harmful only at one end.
You can solve both problems by putting some space between your hand and the trigger. You can do this by starting with an open hand and touching the trigger with the pad of your finger, held extended. Close your other fingers and thumb around the grip, and you should have the space you need. It’s simple to do, but for some hard to remember. Unlearning old bad habits is one of the challenges in learning a proper, useful technique, but with some effort it can be done.
Stock configuration certainly affects trigger-hand position. A straight hand offers the most latitude, a shallow pistol grip the next, and a full pistol least of all—especially the plowshare shape that a lot of Italian makers prefer. A deeply curved grip literally dictates where your hand can be. You can move your hand forward a bit from the grip, but you can’t move it any farther back than the grip allows. Shooters with especially long fingers may find this a problem. The only way to gain more distance is to have the grip reshaped, which is a job for a good stockmaker. He may also have to move the point of the comb back. This is where the comb rises from the top of the grip; it’s known as the “thumbhole” in the British trade, because it’s where the base of the shooter’s thumb contacts the rise of the comb. There’s an American design called a thumbhole, but it isn’t the same thing.
One really important aspect of grasping a stock with the trigger hand is making sure to roll your thumb over the top of the grip. Many bird hunters are accustomed to pushing the safety off somewhere in the midst of the swing-and-mount sequence. This is good gun handling, optimally safe. Others, however, tend to leave that thumb on top of the grip. This is not good, though the safety factor applies mostly to the shooter.
Having opposable thumbs is crucial to human accomplishment. Imagine where we’d be without them, and that applies as much in shooting as in any manual exercise. If you don’t use your thumb, you end up supporting the whole rear end of the gun with just three fingers—or more likely two, because the little finger doesn’t actually contribute very much. Apply the thumb and you’ll increase control of the gun many-fold.
The other hazard in leaving your thumb on top of the grip is purely physical. The back end of a break-action gun’s toplever is usually rather thin, and recoil can drive it right into the end of your thumb. The result is always painful, sometimes grotesquely bloody. I’ve seen some thumbs split open that way, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Wrist angle also can affect your trigger hand. Getting the wrong angle is uncommon. I can remember seeing this perhaps twice in 12 years of schools, but when it happens, it can be frustrating, both for a shooter who’s trying to do everything right and for an instructor whose job it is to find and correct problems in technique.
Your wrist should be as straight as possible. Cocking it upward interferes with your gun mount and makes getting the stock to your cheekbone more difficult. When I try it (and I don’t advise for or against anything I haven’t tried myself), I can feel my whole arm tighten up all the way to my shoulder. It feels extremely awkward, as if I’m struggling against my own body, and that does nothing to aid good shooting. Cocking the wrist downward doesn’t do as much mischief to the gun mount, but it creates the same undesirable tension in the arm and moreover tempts you to crowd the trigger.
A lot of silly things have been written about shooting guns with two triggers, particularly about changing hand position between shots. Some have insisted that it’s necessary to slide your hand back in order to reach the rear trigger. That’s nonsense.
And I’m sure my eyes begin to glaze when someone tells me he just can’t shoot a gun with double triggers. What he’s really saying is, “I tried it once and got confused, so therefore I can’t shoot with two triggers.” More nonsense. Anybody can shoot with two triggers. If your whole experience is in using one trigger —say, on an over/under or a repeater—then going to two simply requires remembering that you have a second trigger and getting accustomed to using it. This doesn’t take much practice.
You don’t shoot double triggers by moving your hand, only your finger. If you set up with the pad of your finger on the front trigger, all you need to do is pull it, let your finger slide over the blade and pull the back one. You can practice this while watching a baseball game. You don’t even need to have the barrels on the gun or actually pull the triggers. Just repeat the move until you don’t have to think about it, which should take about four innings. If you can’t train one finger, you probably shouldn’t be shooting anyway.
Once your hands are in the right places, the question of grip pressure comes up. How hard should you grasp a gun? Certainly not as if you were killing a snake or as if the gun were so hot you could scarcely touch it. Firm pressure is ideal, especially with your leading hand. You might not realize it, but the forward hand, properly used, absorbs a lot of recoil. Your shoulder shouldn’t bear the whole brunt—or at least it shouldn’t have to.
As I said at the start, shooting is essentially eye-hand coordination. Both elements need to do their part. Get them working in harmony and the result is likely to be a successful shot. And successful shots are what we’re all trying to achieve.

Michael McIntosh is the author of such books as A.H. Fox, Wild Things, Best Guns, Shotguns and Shooting, and More Shotguns and Shooting. His new book, Shotguns and Shooting Three, will be available this fall.