Groupings are getting tighter. I used the same swivel bipod set-up for the SCAR-17 @ 100 yards, using 145 gr. .308. On some of the attempts I was unable to see the exact target @ 6x illumination, which is the highest magnification on my scope. Generally on a head-sized target you aren’t worried much about anything but hitting the head, but at 100 yards I’d like to be able to be more exact.
On this first close-up of the hostage target, you’ll see the shots placed high of the mouth box. I couldn’t makeout that box from 100 yards, even with a black dot (instead of an illuminated red) scope. It’s just too small, at about 1″ tall x 2″ wide. So I approximated the shots.
On this second hostage target, I recorded the strategy Swen mentioned in the comments to my last training post. I set up target areas on the gunman’s outside shoulder, on his gun hand, and then again on an immediate kill zone on the forehead. I was able to hit the hand on 2 of 3 shots, with the third shot hitting the arm holding the gun; on the shoulder, I hit 3 of 4 inside the box I drew up, with the fourth shot maybe an inch off below the box (but still on the shoulder). A fifth shot went wide right. On the head shots, which I’ve practiced most, I hit 8 out of 10 inside the eyes-to-forehead box and 10 out of 10 on the upper half of the head.
Finally, here’s an 8″ x 8″ VisiShot target, which I’ve photographed closer up. All my shots were within 2″ of center, with 7 of the 9 within 1″ to 1 1/4″.
I also shot my S&W M&P 22LR today — but I’m going to work on that scope. The dot is so far off I wasn’t even hitting the target. So I took the scope of and with just iron sights, I put 8 out of 10 shots within an inch of the bulls eye on the 8″ x 8″ target, but only out to 25 yards. If I’m going to go longer range with the 22LR, I think I’m going to need to get something other than a red dot scope with 2x.
Anyway, there you have it. Comments / critiques / suggestions welcome.
The dot is so far off I wasn’t even hitting the target
next you’ll be blaming moe videos ;)
Heh. No, seriously. Lined up center bullseye, and the shot wasn’t even hitting the target. I need to get into a pistol lane and sight it in at 3 yards so that I can at least begin making adjustments. I have no idea where those shots were going.
the top pic is some nice shooting
^^ A friend of mine had a similar problem when he bought his .243, used a cheap laser pointer to get the dot close enough to the target to sight it in conventionally. Might give it a try if you’ve got one. I always do as you suggest because I don’t have a laser pointer and, owning no cats, have no other use for one.
Also, what is the reason for shooting at the mouth as opposed to the nose area?
Somebody noted earlier that a shot through the mouth is an instant kill with no concomitant reflex to squeeze a trigger, say.
So I’ve taken to practicing hitting the mouth.
Jeff, once had the same problem after flying to TX to go hog hunting. Scope mount had loosened without me noticing. Make sure mount and rings are tight. Use Loc-Tite once you’re sighted in. One bit of looseness and you’re all over the paper.
“. . . the reason for shooting at the mouth as opposed to the nose area?”
The tastiest bits of the autonomic nervous system sit more or less directly behind there. It’s the on-off light switchy part of the CNS.
Just for reference, the black box on the head in pic two is the size of a standard Post-it note.
So what I want to hit, sdferr, is, as another reader noted, the area from the outside corner of the eyes to the outside corner of the mouth — missing low at the eyes and high at the mouth. That’s the “softest” path to the on/off switch.
What about the forehead area? I can’t remember who it was who told me to direct aim there. I suspect it’s an instant kill, but then, will there be a potential trigger pull as reflex?
The cerebrum is iffy, I’ve heard. People who know head wounds say that JFK’s movements in the car at Dallas were entirely consistent with that kind of head shot.
…and videos I’ve seen of people getting hit in the big skull bubble (don’t ask) seem to bear this out. Suicides seem to wave their arms in odd ways immediately after.
Head wounds are hard to predict. Some people can get a through-and-through GSW to the temple and live to tell the tale. (Seen it. Don’t ask.) If your perp has a lot of bridgework, that changes trajectory on the cartridge as it impacts.
Yup. Some head wounds turn out fatal because of blood loss rather than brain trauma.
The way I understand it the optimal target structure is the medulla oblongata, which, as these parts go, isn’t all that big. Though crashing a bullet through the upper mouth and skull is surely going to be spraying bone as well as deformed metal and hence stand a fair chance of cutting through the brain stem even if the entry point is off-set a tad to one side or the other.
I think headshots are destroying the trophy value of killing off hostage-taking bad guys.
One magazine through the ticker and off to the taxidermist he goes.
Unless it ricochets off the teeth, exits the cheek, enters the cheek, deflects again off of the cheek bone, and then travels up into the brain of the hostage.
Well hey, ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.
So. For headshots, what do we like? Soft Points? Hollow tips? Open-tip match? Nozler partitions? Balistic Tips? Boat tails? Flat bases? Bonded Cores? What about dum-dums —anybody still use wadcutters?
– You people are grisly, blood thirsty, and macabre.
– Excellent Visigoths!
Ain’t that the awful bloody truth?
– Excellent Visigoths!
Just doing our part for justice™, BBH.
Presumably if you are shooting someone, you plan on them not living through it. Therefore, it seems prudent to make sure they don’t.
– So, Chavez, Castro, Putin endorse Obama, which you know, will look great on his resume when he applies for third world Marxist dictator after November.
I thought legally, the most you can do is stop someone from doing whatever it is that you don’t want them to do. Now, if someone doing —or attempting to do— something you don’t want them to happens to wind up either dead or fatally wounded as the result of the action you take to make them stop, well, that’s their problem.
But as I understand it, Coups de grâce are Verboten.
“New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg explained Friday why he is supporting Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) over Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, invoking “socialism” and the Soviet Union in the process.
In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times published Sunday, Bloomberg defended his support for Brown, citing the senator’s tough stance on concealed weapons.
“What I’ve tried to do is find liberal middle-of-the-road Republicans and Democrats,” Bloomberg said. “In the Senate, Scott Brown, who single-handedly stopped the right-to-carry bill. You can question whether he’s too conservative. You can question, in my mind, whether [Warren is] God’s gift to regulation, close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the U.S.S.R.”
Bloomberg continued: “Now, I don’t have to agree with [Brown] on a lot of other things, although he’s certainly no crazy right-wing – he’s just more conservative than I am – but here’s a guy that really made a difference, and if we don’t support people like that, nobody’s going to take risks.”
It’s not the first time the label has been used against the Democratic candidate. Last year, Warren was heckled as a “socialist whore” by a Tea Party supporter, and the likes of Ron Paul and Karl Rove’s super PAC have also used the term in reference to Warren.”
– Apparently the Progressive Mayor prefers Facism over stoggy old Socialism. at least in his own baliwick, and if you’re for gun control and anti big gulp you’re his kind of candidate. You have to give him an “A” for total inconsistancy.
Re. the .22, if I recall correctly from my Ruger 1022 (last shot 15 yrs ago), there’s little point to putting a Serious Scope on a .22 rifle and shooting at 100yds. The bullets themselves just aren’t accurate at long range, what with the negligable mass and all. You’ll get nothing like the impressive accuracy of your .308.
Stick to 25yds and under on the .22 and you’ll be happy.
We really need to make the Democrat Party safe for people like Brown and Christie.
Unlikely with .308.
Unlikely with .308.
Relatively speaking, sure. But I think, perhaps incorrectly, that there are too many variables involved for that to be an absolute statement.
As in less likely than .223, more likely than with .415 Rigby, say.
All things being equal, which of course never happens in real life.
Also, looking at the picture, it seems to me that Zombie Kieth Richards has his head cocked and chin lowered, so, contra mojo, shooting him in the mouth in this instance is only going to be effective if the bullet goes on to hit the spinal column. I think maybe you’d be better off aiming for his nose.
Maybe.
Personally, I’m relying on Jedi Mind tricks.
You don’t need to eat this lady, she can go about her business, you want to go home and chug a fifth of Jack Daniels.
If you manage to hit the medulla oblongata, it’s lights out. If you miss the spinal column altogether, it might still be death but more slowly.
I would tend to shoot through the nose, if you can credit this animation. The medulla is a bit fatter of a target than the spinal column, so if you hit that you’re probably going to disrupt all activity downstream of that.
BTW I only got through the first new episode of Walking Dead, and wondered why they didn’t simply lure all zombies to the chain-link fence and spear them through the eye sockets.
That would probably put a fairly quick and boring (although still bloody) end to the series, I imagine.
So, this zombie life is just an infection, supposedly. How come this infection doesn’t obey normal rules of physics? How are all of these zombies still ambulatory, months after having their last meal? Are they eating each other? If so, why aren’t there fewer of them?
I know: my disbelief needs a suspension overhaul.
Slart, don’t wreck the fun.
I watch 2 shows on tv. That’s it. This is one of them.
I cancelled netflix to save money, and now I’m back to waitressing …
So my tv/movie viewing is suffering greatly in the Obama economy. Apparently all the good shows are on channels I can’t afford.
Hope and change.
So, what I’m saying is that you step off criticizing the Walking Dead.
If they kill off the pregnant chick, though, I wouldn’t complain. I find her continued survival to be a bit far fetched.
There was a home invasion 30 miles or so South of me last night. Homeowner dead.
But they have two of the suspects in custody, so that’s all so very reassuring.
@@
Somewhere, yesterday (I don’t remember where) I read an article that while black on black violence has remained about the same (rather high), black on white violence has increased.
Hope and change.
I need a gun.
OTOH I think the introduction of a cache of antique nihonto, along with the realtime training of their proper use on zombies, might be a cool story-line.
I don’t think the pregnant chick is any more annoying or more farfetched than e.g. Laurie Holden’s character.
They’re all fairly annoying. They all do stupid things. The only one of them that should be alive at this point is the sheriff, but that would also make for fairly boring theater.
Someone once told me that a gutshot* is more likely to make the bad guy drop his weapon unfired, but I think unless you happen to shoot him there in a place where it takes days for an ambulance to arrive, you’re going to need a lawyer, coup de grace or no coup de grace.
*By my reckoning, that might even be below the belt, literally.
They’re all fairly annoying. They all do stupid things. The only one of them that should be alive at this point is the sheriff, but that would also make for fairly boring theater.
Now that’s just kookie talk. What about Daryl?
Daryl is a cipher. He’s both the most and least crazy person in the group.
He’s definitely a survivor, though, so: point.
I just knew that John Lennon fellow was full of shit
Heard about this Carin?
How come it isn’t The Shuffling Dead? Ain’t seen the first one walk yet.
As mentioned, it’s the medulla that is the ‘off switch.’ It is an over sized golf ball at the rear base of the brain.
For a level shot into an upright head that means aiming for the philtrum (between the lips and nose.) A mouth shot might be too low (unless you are firing from a bipod at a standing target, in which case carry on.)
6x is getting into that no man’s zone, where it is a little high for fast work, 2x or 4x offering a better field of view; and too low for fine stuff, which really starts at 12x.
On big game rifles I usually have an adjustable of 2.5-8x or 3.5-10x, but am really only concerned about hitting the vital zone – roughly an 6-8″ circle on a deer and 10-12″ on an elk. And I lean towards smaller rather than larger, as they are lighter, can typically be mounted closer to the bore for less parallax, better cheek weld and quicker sight acquisition.
Same goes for coyotes, but I won’t shoot them past 100 yards or so. Not because you can’t hit them, but because I refuse to walk that far for a coyote. If you wait they generally get closer.
With prairie dogs and ground squirrels it’s the biggest glass I can afford, maybe 6.5-20x. But, as you might imagine, if a jackrabbit comes by at 20 yards you’d be hard pressed to get your reticle on him, even at 6.5x, so they are very dedicated tools.
Heard about this Carin?
Yep, creepy.
Good thing no one’s been killed so far.
How come it isn’t The Shuffling Dead?
They have that. It’s called the World Series of Poker, and it’s on every other channel about 20 hours out of the day.
oh my aching sides
Hmmm….
Iran’s N. [..uclear] Rights Acknowledged by Obama
Granted, it is FARS, the Iranian propaganda shop, but this:
…seems like it could be confirmed or denied.
Thomas D:
The best thing about the scope I use is that it’s designed to be optimal in CQB, where in testing it bested even the ELCAN (along with a bunch of simple red dot sights).
At 1x mag it is true 1. Great field of view, and the reticle looks a bit like a trijicon triangle.
Let me know if you can see this
[…] my readers are also gun enthusiats. You can find a recent post on my ongoing training, in fact, here. You can do a site search once there to find other posts — including earlier posts from when I was […]
“Let me know if you can see this ”
Here’s what’s there on the loaded pw page:
“Not Found
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