Shooting

In our Fieldsport wingshooting schools, Bryan Bilinski and I teach a rather simple technique based upon two fundamental facts. We’ve been at it for 14 years now, constantly seeking to hone it all to the finest edge that imparts the knowledge clearly and without clutter. But we still have to come back to those two unassailable truths. They are the foundation upon which everything else rests.
    Fact No. 1: Everything that moves follows a line.
    This applies equally to a vehicle rolling down a road, to a swimming fish, to a bird or clay target flying through the air. All come from somewhere and are going somewhere and thus describe a line from Point A to Point B.
    These lines may be simple, such as those of straight crossing targets, or complex, such as those of dropping targets, which seem to infatuate so many clays-course managers these days. They are all lines nonetheless.
    A shooter needs to train himself to visualize these flight lines. It takes some practice, just like anything else worth doing, but once you put your mind to it the task isn’t all that difficult.
    Use whatever visualization aids might help. Imagine a target as leaving a smoke trail, towing a ribbon, having great long tailfeathers, whatever—anything that gives you a sense of the line it’s traveling. (I don’t recommend trying to pick up on the flight lines among a swarm of gnats. That’ll drive you bat-crazy. I’ve tried it, which probably explains some things, or so my wife would tell you.) Better to start with things that fly in more straightforward ways, and then you can graduate to the more complex.
    With practice, you’ll find that you can identify flight lines almost instantly. You don’t need a hundred yards’ observation, and when shooting certain birds, you don’t get it anyway. A few feet will do. A good visual lock will be enough.
    And why is this flight-line business important to a shooter? Even working with a three-foot shot swarm, a flying target is surrounded by about 350 degrees of permutations that can lead to a miss. Starting with the basic four—above, below, behind and in front—you can imagine all of the combinations that might apply. But if you’re moving the gun along the flight line, you can narrow those down to two: behind or in front. Those seem like better odds to me.
    Fact No. 2: We are all born with a gift.
    Assuming normal bodily and brain functions, we are born with the gift of eye-hand coordination, and it’s uncanny. Our hands will unerringly go where our eyes are looking. It works just as well the other way around; our eyes will go where our hands point, but that’s of little use to shooters. Because we can’t hit what we can’t see, thinking of hand-eye coordination isn’t much benefit. In shooting, the eyes always come first, hence the emphasis upon visualizing flight lines.
    Here the theory grows a bit more complex but not daunting. In order to make best use of our wonderful gift, we let our eyes focus on the flight line, move the gun along that path to the target and then a certain distance in front. How far depends upon gun speed. As my mentor Jack Mitchell always said, lead is speed and speed is lead. We never try to prescribe lead in schools. For one thing, it’s impossible at distance, and for another, we can’t know what a shooter is seeing. If I suggest a change in a shooter’s rhythm, it’s far more often to slow down rather than speed up. Bryan likes to describe speed as getting into harmony with the target, and I can’t improve on that. When a shooter and a target are in synch, it becomes a dance. Fast or slow doesn’t much matter; the synch part is what counts. Some want to rush after a target as though it’s about to disappear at warp velocity; others, more hesitant, want to ride it forever. The sweet spot is somewhere between.
Eye-hand coordination is a natural act if we allow it to remain so. Overanalyzing, which I like to call trying to think a target to death, is anathema. No target ever broke nor any bird ever died from thought waves ricocheting around in a shooter’s head.   If you’re doing everything else right, you just pull the trigger and take your chances.
    There are some things you can do physically to assist your natural gift. Because a gun is meant to simply be pointed and not aimed like a rifle, pay attention to how we instinctively point. The gesture is with an arm fully outstretched and pointing an index finger. Even little kids do this, and that tells me that it truly is instinctive, because little kids don’t do much of anything that isn’t. But adults make that gesture, too, so something must be built in. I suspect it’s something to do with making best use of our natural eye-hand coordination. Why else?
    To help shooters, we encourage taking a comfortably long hold with the leading hand, the one that guides the barrels (see “Laying On of Hands,” July/August ’08). We don’t recommend extending that hand so far that the elbow locks—that only binds the shoulder and neck muscles—but we do suggest not pulling the leading hand so far back that it’s almost under your nose. That’s not very accurate when the intent is having eyes and hands working together.
    Think of the gun as an extension of a pointing finger. If it helps to actually extend that finger into some comfortable position on the gun, fine. Whatever works can only be a benefit.
    Trying to hit a moving target by eye-hand coordination requires that one element in the equation remains stable, unmoving. As it can’t be the gun or the hands, it has to be the eyes—or at least the head. We can move our eyes without moving our heads, and keeping one’s head dead still is among our fundamental precepts. On the morning of Day One we ask our clients to fire three or four shots at a very easy incoming target without any instruction. We’re looking to evaluate the raw material we’ll be dealing with for two days, and in recent years we’ve taken to putting this on videotape.
    You’d be amazed—or maybe not—to see how many shooters snatch the gun to their shoulder, bang their head onto the stock and go chasing after a target already long gone. This is breaking what should be a one-piece move into three. There is a better way, and the conversation between Bryan and me afterward usually revolves around something like, “Well, nothing we haven’t seen before, and nothing we can’t fix.”
    The point of keeping your head still is twofold. One is that moving your head screws up your eye-hand coordination. Do that and your visual focus goes down the drain, so no matter how well you’ve read the flight line, you lose it and have to find it again. That’s just a waste of motion.
    The other reason for no head movement is to preserve a solid mounting point for the gun. The critical contact is right under your cheekbone, not on your shoulder. If the gun fits, it should point where you look, no matter where the butt end comes to rest. Make five mounts just to your shoulder alone, and I’ll bet that you’ll hit at least four different places. Mount to your zygomatic arch (for you medical types), and the butt will be in the same place every time. This is called consistency.
    But I’m meandering from theory into technique, and that’s well beyond the scope of this piece. Let’s just call it a story for another time.