So....I'm a terrible shot. Help?

Just one more bit.

It's much easier to train proper technique in at the beginning. Training out bad techniques can take forever, and worse yet, if you leArn a bad practice, when you have a stress situation, it's likely that you might lapse. Call it buck fever if you will. You can't shoot the deer if you forget the safety.
 
Practice.

Lessons are also a good idea. Look for instruction at the local ranges, CMP and Appleseed events. Another option could be if there is a college of some type near you that offered a marksmanship course. I had the opportunity to take one in college that was taught by the ROTC instructor.

Look up and research the fundamentals of marksmanship.

Practice some more.

For learning and practicing the fundamentals, a good quality air rifle can be an excellent tool. Move to firearms and then back to the air rifle as you start making mistakes to take the noise out of the equation.

Practice some more.
 
Practice.
Practice.
Practice.


Don't be afraid to look like an idiot, holding a rifle while you stand in the living room, watching TV for 20-30 minutes at a time.

Don't be afraid to practice holding the sight picture on Jeremy Clarkson's head while you watch Top Gear.

I would recommend dry-firing, as well... but some firearm designs don't hold up as well as others. Snap caps and/or action-proving dummies may be in order. But, before that...


Practice.
Practice.
Practice.
 
With regard to the suggestions that the OP practice, the question is always practice what and how. Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. And practice also makes permanent, so someone who in practice keeps doing things badly, over and over, becomes an expert at doing it badly.

The point of good training/coaching is to learn what to practice and how to practice it.

The basic principles I discuss below apply to both handguns and rifles.

  1. The first principle of accurate shooting is trigger control: a smooth press straight back on the trigger with only the trigger finger moving. Maintain your focus on the front sight (or the reticle if using a scope) as you press the trigger, increasing pressure on the trigger until the shot breaks. Don't try to predict exactly when the gun will go off nor try to cause the shot to break at a particular moment. This is what Jeff Cooper called the "surprise break."

  2. One wants to place his finger on the trigger in a manner that facilitates that. Usually, the best place for the finger to contact the trigger will be the middle of the portion of the finger between the first knuckle and the fingertip, and that part of the finger should be perpendicular to the direction in which the trigger moves.

    • With some triggers, e. g., heavy double action triggers with a long travel, that placement might not provide enough leverage to work the trigger smoothly. In such cases, the trigger may be placed at the first joint.

    • In either case, the trigger finger needs to be curved away from the gun sufficiently to allow it to press the trigger straight back without the trigger finger binding or applying lateral pressure to the gun. If one has to reach too far to get his finger properly on the trigger (or turn the gun to the point that the axis of the barrel is significantly misaligned with the forearm), the gun is too big. (For example, I have a short trigger reach and can't properly shoot some handguns, like N frame Smith & Wesson revolvers double action.)

  3. By keeping focus on the front sight (or reticle) and increasing pressure on the trigger until the gun essentially shoots itself, you don’t anticipate the shot breaking. But if you try to make the shot break at that one instant in time when everything seem steady and aligned, you usually wind up jerking the trigger.

  4. Of course the gun will wobble a bit on the target. It is just not possible to hold the gun absolutely steady. Because you are alive, there will always be a slight movement caused by all the tiny movement associated with being alive: your heart beating; tiny muscular movements necessary to maintain your balance, etc. Try not to worry about the wobble and don’t worry about trying to keep the sight aligned on a single point. Just let the front sight be somewhere in a small, imaginary box in the center of the target. And of course, properly using some form of rest will also help minimize wobble.

  5. In our teaching we avoid using the words "squeeze" or "pull" to describe the actuation of the trigger. We prefer to refer to "pressing" the trigger. The word "press" seems to better describe the process of smoothly pressing the trigger straight back, with only the trigger finger moving, to a surprise break.

  6. You'll want to be able to perform the fundamentals reflexively, on demand without conscious thought. You do that by practicing them slowly to develop smoothness. Then smooth becomes fast.

    • Again, remember that practice doesn't make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

    • Practice also makes permanent. If you keep practicing doing something poorly, you will become an expert at doing it poorly.

  7. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of the gun firing "by surprise." They feel that when using the gun for practical applications, e. g., hunting or self defense, they need to be able to make the gun fire right now. But if you try to make the gun fire right now, you will almost certainly jerk the trigger thus jerking the gun off target and missing your shot. That's where the "compressed surprise break" comes in.

    • As you practice (perfectly) and develop the facility to reflexively (without conscious thought) apply a smooth, continuously increasing pressure to the trigger the time interval between beginning to press and the shot breaking gets progressively shorter until it become indistinguishable from being instantaneous. In other words, that period of uncertainty during which the shot might break, but you don't know exactly when, becomes vanishingly short. And that is the compressed surprise break.

    • Here's an interesting video in which Jeff Cooper explains the compressed surprise break. While he is demonstrating with a handgun, the same principles apply with a rifle.

  8. It may help to understand the way humans learn a physical skill.

    • In learning a physical skill, we all go through a four step process:

      • unconscious incompetence, we can't do something and we don't even know how to do it;

      • conscious incompetence, we can't physically do something even though we know in our mind how to do it;

      • conscious competence, we know how to do something but can only do it right if we concentrate on doing it properly; and

      • unconscious competence, at this final stage we know how to do something and can do it reflexively (as second nature) on demand without having to think about it.

    • To get to the third stage, you need to think through the physical task consciously in order to do it perfectly. You need to start slow; one must walk before he can run. The key here is going slow so that you can perform each repetition properly and smoothly. Don't try to be fast. Try to be smooth. Now here's the kicker: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. You are trying to program your body to perform each of the components of the task properly and efficiently. As the programing takes, you get smoother; and as you get smoother you get more efficient and more sure, and therefore, faster.

    • I have in fact seen this over and over, both in the classes I've been in and with students that I've helped train. Start slow, consciously doing the physical act smoothly. You start to get smooth, and as you get smooth your pace will start to pick up. And about now, you will have reached the stage of conscious competence. You can do something properly and well as long as you think about it.

    • To go from conscious competence to the final stage, unconscious competence, is usually thought to take around 5,000 good repetitions. The good news is that dry practice will count. The bad news is that poor repetitions don't count and can set you back. You need to work at this to get good.

    • If one has reached the stage of unconscious competence as far as trigger control is concerned, he will be able to consistently execute a proper, controlled trigger press quickly and without conscious thought. Of course one needs to practice regularly and properly to maintain proficiency, but it's easier to maintain it once achieved than it was to first achieve it.
 
Only perfect practice makes perfect. And practice also makes permanent

I agree. you have to be able to practice the correct way, and keep practicing that way. It gets easy to chase new methods or ways of doing something, but do not go down that rabbit hole. find a teacher that works with you and that you are getting good results. keep with it. do not listen to the guy in the next lane that says "try this"

The saying that amateurs practice until they get it right and professionals practice until they cannot get it wrong is accurate.

I got to be a pretty good pistol marksman a few years ago, with several different pistols. Then I lost a lot of the strength and use of my right hand and did not shoot much for 4 1/2 years. the past few months I am back into shooting pistols, and it does not take but a few rounds to get back into my good habits and hit what I am aiming at. Perfect practice makes permanent.

Good luck, and enjoy your new hobby.

David
 
Another thing about practice:

Useful (perfect) practice requires concentration. You want each exercise, each repetition, to be correct. That takes effort -- focusing on what one is doing and being sure it's being done properly. And that can be fatiguing.

So, especially when a beginner, frequent practice for short periods of time is more productive than less frequent, but longer, practice sessions.
 
If you would be interested in doing it, and could afford it, a shooting school would work miracles. Don't practice bad habits... I'm still trying to break myself from habits I started early on when teaching myself and I've been shooting all my life (hence my username).

Also practice like it's not practice, imagine a squirrel at that distance when shooting the .22, or when using the .30-30 use a large target at then put a dot where the shoulder would be and imagine it to be a deer. Don't think of it as practice, atleast for some this helps.
 
This important point may not have been mentioned.

NEVER SETTLE FOR GOOD ENOUGH. Keep trying. Keep improving. When you are good enough to achieve the goals, say hitting a two inch bullseye, move it farther out, or shoot a smaller one.

The concealed carry permit here requires that the shooter be able to place 20 or so rounds into a human silhouette at 30 feet.

?!!!!!!

Not good enough. That isn't going to be a lifesaving level of skill if that's the end of the road for training. When a person is capable of bullseyes at 50, hitting 5 or 6 inch targets, and doing it well, there is still the matter of being capable under stress, but scattering twenty rounds around a torso target at slow fire isn't the same as trained and capable.

So, more to the point, challenge yourself. When you are comfortably laying rounds in at 50 feet, move to 100, then 50 yards, even 100 yards and two hundred.

Practice off of a bench or bags, then when you feel comfortable, add another handicap. See how you do standing, kneeling, sitting, prone, work on your field positions. Always, always, find a way to make your next range session more successful. Well, Unless you just want to fart around shooting at nerf balls once in a while. Fun is important too, because you don't want this to be a tedious workout, no more fun than an hour on a treadmill.

I've been trying to get my daubhter involved in this but she's a difficult person to get together with. The last time I took her out, she was nailing the 3 inch targets quite well, so I moved them from 50 feet to 90. as she gets still better, well, the targets are made half sized.

BTW, don't waste your training time on junk ammunition. It's hard to know what brand to buy, as it's all so variable, but think about this. If you are trying to make 2 inch shots at 50 feet and your ammunition isn't even capable of that amount of accuracy, and your firearm isn't particularly accurate either, you're going to wind up with groups the size of a coffee can lid. There is nothing more discouraging than pulling the trigger, knowing that it was a good shot, firing a group and knowing in your heart that the ghost of oliver winchester was at your side guiding you, and going to the paper and finding out that you could have done better with buckshot or a slingshot.
 
Wow, those Appleseed events look helpful. There are a few within an hour's drive of my house. I'll definitely give that a try.
 
One thing to note, don't dry fire your .22's for practice. Most of those are designed so that dry firing will allow the firing pin to strike the chamber edge, & repeatedly doing do will peen a depression at that spot
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I have heard dry firing 10/22s will not cause damage. FOr most other guns this is true and I wouldn't push my luck on a 10/22 anyways.

Snap caps are so cheap to be able to not worry about it:
I like these because they come in a 25 pack. You can lose a few, crush a few, give a few away, and still have enough to load a revolver cylinder.
 
Luckily the OP has three near perfect guns to learn with. The Marlin .22 rifle whatever model it is, a Ruger single six and a Ruger 22/45.

I can't speak specifics about the rifle, but in general all tthe Marlin .22s I've shot have been fun to shoot with solid accuracy. The single six is a great introduction to plow handle revolvers and many people think the 22/45 is the best .22 auto in a mid price range.

Get some lessons and have fun.
 
If you have a double action pistol, with a long hard trigger pull --- First distal joint trigger finger pressure might be required.


I use my firmest firing hand finger pressure on my pistols...using my middle finger.

Treat your trigger finger as it's own entity.

Take two deep relaxing breaths....then on the third --- Let one half to two thirds out...the take the shot within 8 seconds --- If not...repeat the process over again.

Were proper hearing and eye protection. You'll have to realize the gun is not going to hurt you.

On rifles: Use slight rearward pressure on the firing hand...with all fingers grasping the stock or pistol grip relaxed, except for your little finger; which has the firmest pressure on the stock.

Over time...a "surprise trigger break" might not help you in the long run, but it might help you at first.

http://www.shootingillustrated.com/articles/2015/3/23/the-zen-of-shooting
 
The advice about Appleseed is dead-on. I qualified "expert" in the Army and I learned more about shooting and improved more in two days than in the past 20 years of shooting on my own.

From the guns you own, the Marlin .22 would work for an Appleseed event but it is not ideal. I don't want to hijack your thread so I am posting some thoughts about Appleseed over in "Lock and Load: Live Fire Exercises". I read all I could about what to bring and still didn't feel very prepared. I could have gotten even more from the course if I had been better equipped.
 
Taking a class when you want to learn something is generally a fantastic idea.

Do you have a backyard or garage? You may wish to consider the purchase of a good quality air rifle and/or air pistol.

Other than recoil control, all the basics of marksmanship are there, and you have the convenience of being able to practice at home whenever you wish.
 
Two pages of advise and nothing about the basics and safety. Do you know and follow the 10 Commandments of Firearm Safety? :confused:

https://www.hunter-ed.com/minnesota...mandments-of-Firearm-Safety/201024_700102921/

Be careful, or you may shoot your eye out. And I'm not kidding. The last thing we need is for someone with little knowledge about safe gun handling being on the news for "accidentally" hurting himself or others. :eek:

Take a Hunter Safety Course NOW! If you want to hunt this fall it will be a requirement so you may as well sign up for one as soon as you can. An NRA basic firearm course is a good idea too.
 
"Trigger pull is a topic about which rifle shooters obsess, usually claiming one brand rifle has a deplorable trigger while another brand of rifle has an outstanding crisp, clean pull.

Many experienced shooters claim the trigger break should 'surprise' you, a notion that the Discover Courage team deplores. If you're the shooter, the shot goes when you decide, but you have to understand how to properly give the command.

Successful trigger finger control really begins with the rest of the hand and how it engages the rifle's grip. The thumb should be relaxed on the top of the rifle. The grip itself should have most of the energy transfer traveling through the smallest finger with pressure gradually lightening through the ring finger and final to the middle finger, which should be free on the grip.

The force on the grip, minimal as it is, should always be straight back and into the shoulder, and the hand should never apply torque that twists the rifle or represents lateral force on the pistol grip. If you do that you'll never achieve full accuracy potential.

The first step toward better trigger control is to identify which part of the finger --- general the finger pad of your trigger finger --- makes contact with the trigger. Once that is established, you must be sure you aren't allowing contact between your shooting finger and any portion of the stock --- dragging wood, as it's called. That will throw off your shot and will translate into larger groups. At 100 yards the effects will be minimal. At 600 plus yards you'll miss the target entirely."

May I also add...that you should also follow through with the trigger press, by burying the trigger in the rear of the trigger guard.

quotes: From excerpts...Rifle Shooter magazine --- September/October, 2016 --- Principles of Performance, by Brad Fitzpatrick
 
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Erno86 said:
...Many experienced shooters claim the trigger break should 'surprise' you, a notion that the Discover Courage team deplores. If you're the shooter, the shot goes when you decide,...
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I have no idea who or what the "Discover Courage team" is, nor how long they've been around. But the concept of the surprise [trigger] break has been around for quite a while.

On the other hand, here's how Charles Askins, Jr.(who among his other accomplishments, was a champion Bullseye competitor) describes the correct trigger press (Askins, Charles, Jr., The Art of Handgun Shooting, A. S. Barnes and Company, 1941, pg 41):
...Eventually the steadily increasing pressure on the sear fires the gun, theoretically while the front sight is directly in line with the bullseye....
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And that's pretty much how we describe the surprise break -- a steadily increasing pressure on the trigger until the gun fires. And since it was described in a book published in 1941, it's been around at least 75 years.

As far as the gun firing when you want it to fire, here, again, is a video in which Jeff Cooper describes the compressed surprise break.
 
My feelings are...is that I don't want to train for a "surprise" trigger break, because I want my self conscious to decide whether I should commit taking the trigger press, so as in order to execute the shot. My only surprise, comes when I don't execute the shot properly.

"According to the team at Discover Courage --- which comprises some of the most experienced military shooting instructors of the modern era like Jay Manty, Navy SEAL and the former director of Naval Special Warfare Scout sniper program --- principles of performance are the elements that serve as the foundation of successful bullet placement."

"although an article cannot substitute for real-life one-on-one instruction"

quote: Rifle Shooter magazine, Principles of Performance
 
Erno86 said:
My feelings are...is that I don't want to train for a "surprise" trigger break, because I want my self conscious to decide whether I should commit taking the trigger press, so as in order to execute the shot. My only surprise, comes when I don't execute the shot properly....
Click to expand...
What does that mean? What are you trying to say?

When one has mastered the compressed surprise break he consciously decides to take the shot and consciously initiates pressure on the trigger. The shot breaks an imperceptible interval later.

The surprise break leading to the compressed surprise break is a well tested, over decades of training many thousands or shooteres, way of teaching trigger control. The goal is to program out the common errors of jerking the trigger or flinching. And when one has mastered the compressed surprise break he might not know exactly when the shot will break, but he will know within a nano second (or something on that order) when the shot will break -- probably less time than the interval between the brain making the decision to shoot and the finger actually beginning to apply pressure on the trigger.

Remember that no action is truly instantaneous. There is a time interval between each of the events in the chain of events leading to the act having been executed -- the eye seeing the sights on target (or the gun indexed) --> the brain registering what the eye has seen --> the brain deciding to shoot --> the brain sending out the instruction to the trigger finger to begin pressing on the trigger --> the trigger finger beginning to apply pressure to the trigger --> the sear moving and releasing the hammer or striker --> the firing pin or striker hitting the primer --> the primer igniting --> the primer igniting the propellant --> the burning propellant building up enough gas pressure to begin the bullet's travel down the barrel --> the bullet exiting the barrel.

When properly executed, including a compressed surprise break, the intervals between each link in that chain of events will be vanishingly short. It will be perceived as instantaneous, but it is not really.

I suspect that the real problem some folks have with the surprise break and the compressed surprised break is that they weren't their ideas.
 
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