Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Good and fast or fast and good?

Leatham sure looks smooth and not fast when making magazine changes' but the timer says he is fast

The expression "fast is smooth" is accurate, but it's something that is often used to keep people focused on fundamentals. And if you're trying to get a shooter from 7 seconds to 5 seconds on a Bill Drill, that may very well be an effective means of getting that shooter to where he needs to be for that particular period of instruction.

The problem becomes shooters that move the left hand to their cover shirt, draw, establish grip, squeeze, BAM. A-zone. Every time. And that's good. But they continue to move slow because they have it in their head that the instructor taught them to "be smooth" to the point that they will sacrifice speed.

But if you want that shooter to get to a sub 2 or 3 second time, you have to get him to move his fugking ass. To include being fast on the trigger.

We also shooting everything in a double elimination format. We normally shoot everything at 25 feet.

At our club, you are allowed to bring 3 magazines of 6 rounds each to the line. Since we don't have different matches for revolvers, this gives wheel gunners a better chance. Rarely does anybody get into a second magazine--you've either won or lost by then.

To me smooth means no wasted Motion, moving as fast as you are capable of without attempting to go faster than you are capable of

That's another part of the equation.

Getting different brains to understand what the instructor is saying.

Not saying your interpretation is wrong, just that not everybody hears what the guy next to him heard.

There are always going to be different club rules for sure. We start with a low ready, or pistol on the rail, either wait for command of commence and then fire or we switch it up and use a buzzer from a shot timer. The front edge of our table is at 35 feet, so the rear pins (for 22lr) are going to be approx. 38 feet from the shooter. The added distance creates a little more difficulty. Yesterday we had a new club member join us and he's shot a lot more pin shoots in Vancouver and the Portland area, and rumor has it that he's taken all the pins off the table at a timed 2.8 seconds. He uses a very nice souped up Volquartsen. He won a few matches, but none of the events. If deflave gets into pin shooting, he will realize that you do indeed need to shoot fast and accurately, if he wants to win. Especially if he goes up against seasoned shooters...

Do you shoot at Clark in Vancouver? We had a couple new guys come from Clark rifles yesterday.

I tend to agree in principle. But there is a reason:

Any hit on an 8" steel plate or the 6"x12" A-Zone of a silhouette is "good enough" and earns you full points. You can risk shooting faster, because the targets are bigger. (Imagine a speed match where the plates were 3" in diameter or the A-Zone was 3"x 6". The shooting would be slower.)

Bowling pins, unlike other speed targets, have a sweet spot (see the pic, below). You need to hit it to have success. I don't have a pin in front of me, but the sweet spot is probably 3"x 6" or so. If you don't hit it, the pin likely won't go back and off the table. A tipped over pin on the table accomplishes nothing, except wasting ammo, time, and possibly presenting a smaller profile to shoot at (i.e. a knocked-over pin with its bottom facing you). A sideways knocked-over pin still needs to be hit in the sweet spot, otherwise it just spins (they pivot on their chubby middle and rotate like a propeller). It's one of the factors that makes pin-shooting fun: a bad hit, might be a "hit," but it might actually make things worse.

So the targets are smaller, and when you couple that with the fact that there is no national league and no real prizes involved, the best shooters don't bother with local pin matches. Pin matches are typically a group of regular guys, shooting stock pistols, at small targets. Consequently it goes slower.

With that explanation, I agree pin matches don't "involve a lot of fast shooting."



Here's an old video my daughter took of me squeaking one out in a match. If a guy can consistently clear the table in 3.75 seconds or so, you'll do fine. Even keeping under 5.0, you'll probably be OK. Just don't miss and need to change mags:

No, I've only shot at my home club, Centralia Rifle Club.

That's fast. Very fast.

I've never been close to that.

And therein lies the biggest problem for most people.................many that try to be fast on the trigger tend to jerk it.

As range goes beyond 5 yards at any kind of refined target (like pin tops), jerking the trigger much at all get you a lot of misses.

MM

Sorry Wade, that question was for ss336. His location says Willamette valley. I was assuming Portland salem area, so shooting at Clark would be a high possibility.

BSA, I shoot at Albany pistol and rifle club. Because of the C-19 we haven’t shoot since the “lockdown”. We get about 15 to 20 shooters In average. It’s a club event, we have about 5 really good shooters and the rest of us. At my age, mid 70’s, I’m more of a participant than a competitor. Still fun and I can win some rounds but haven’t won’t match since 2016.
Waders, we also shoot 6 rounds and 2 reloads, except for 22rf which is 10 and 2 reloads, and your right if you have to reload your probably not a winner.
It’s a lot of fun and can be very humbling when shooting against a good shooter.

So true. It really gets interesting when you set up courses where the shooter goes in blind [no preview], and there are clusters of targets w/ no shoots and body positioning required for pass throughs. Any course that requires positive target ID and problem solving will tell you how fast you can really go in a zero defects environment.

Smooth is fast, combat effective hits, any hit is a good hit; old concepts that let the students feel good about their shortcomings and sold more classes.

mike r

I agree with all of that.




How are you guys getting an accurate time in those conditions? It seems like the enclosed spaces would make it hard to run a timer for each shooter.

Competition is always good and I'm glad you enjoy the game, but if you're competitive with a 3rd Gen Smith I'd argue that nobody is really shooting fast.

Training is definitely different than shooting, but I really enjoy going to a match and see what a Master class shooter in the Open Division is putting up for score so I can get a good idea of what is fast vs slow. If that requires a walk through, I'm taking the walk through because I want to use that barometer to better assess my own ability.

Totally agree on the selling more classes mantra. Doesn't mean there isn't value taken away from the class, but a lot of it gets repeated far too often.

That's why I always try and use a solid metric. USPSA (and the associated drills) come closer than anything IMO.

I agree that a master class shooter is poetry in motion to watch and demos what can be achieved. The winners can make up for hits outside of the A zone w/ speed afoot and great gun handling as a function of the scoring system. If you are a really good shooter the human factors of self defense shooting are much easier to learn and incorporate. Competition combined w/ FOF is about as good as it gets. Great topic!


mike r

We don't use timers. It's a double elimination format, and each match is shot head-to-head. If you win your match, you advance through the bracket.

The winner of each match is determined by the guy whose last pin hits the ground first. (I made reference to times in my post to give an idea of how fast you'd have to be to win at my club.)