Okay. So having solved the medulla oblongata issue — which, incidentally, need not apply to zombies, who will drop from any old brain shot, if “The Walking Dead,” eg., is to be believed — I set out today to tighten my groupings and practice aiming at those areas that are most likely to take down a man, a hostage taker, or a zombie. Also included was a coup de grace, because if a man is going to be bitten by a zombie, we all know that he’ll turn pretty quickly, and neither he nor anybody else among the living wants that. So. Boom.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the photos, of which I took plenty this time. I also broke out the tape measure to add some scale. Keep in mind all these shots were made from a swivel bipod at 100 yards, with the rifle against shoulder. No rear sandbags or rests were used. The rifle is the SCAR-17S loaded with 145 gr. .308 mil surplus ammo. The scope is the GRSC FFP Combat Rifle Scope on a Bobro extended mount.
First, let’s visit our hostage taker and his hostage, she of the unfortunate hair and 80s mom jeans. As you can see, I was able to put all 10 shots into the T-box, which is roughly a 4″x3″x2″ area. The gunman’s head is only about 6″ across. Normally at 100 yards, you’d expect the head to be around 9-10″. So this target, the way I’ve configured it, approximates a shot out at around 140 yards, give or take:
On the next target, again the hostage and her captor, I used groups of 5 shots to aim for the T-box, the shoulder, and the gun hand:
On this target I was again able to tightly group all 5 shots within the T-box; the shoulder box and hand box were harder to see from 100 yards out, but because I could see the different color of the gun hand, distinct from the jacket, I was able to better place the hand shots:
The next target was a masked gunmen. Again, I used a trapezoid for the medulla oblongata — though it was extremely difficult to make out (red on black) at 100 yards. So I used the white of the eyes and the mouth to approximate a frame. I also aimed for the heart and the spinal column, again, largely by approximating based on anatomy:
Which brings us, at last, to the zombies. In one drill/target, two zombies are attacking a business man. I killed the zombies with either T-box head shots or regular head shots, but I had to assume the business man had been bitten or scratched. So I shot one round at him, inside the T-box:
To show you how I did and to add scale, I took some close up photos. On zombie 1, I was 6/6 inside the T-box, and 1/2 in the forehead:
On zombie 2, I hit him where I could, including a pretty nice shot to a circled area:
…and finally, the coup de grace:
Comments and suggestions welcome. Though were I a zombie thinking about walking toward my house, I’d be shitting myself right now. Or whatever it is zombies do with the flesh they’ve eaten. I don’t think that’s been ever properly explored…
[…] times Did a bunch more shooting with the SCAR and the GRSC today. Pics and details here, for those interested in grouping and questions of accuracy. And yes, there were some zombies […]
you need to add some jihadis to your target collection
– So two thoughts.
– First I’m guessing its not going to be easy to find any coroners that want to volunteer for probing a dead zombies ass, and second what do you plan on calling the spin off site for this series – The smoking Zombie?
– “The Smoking Zombie©”
– A site dedicated to hunting down, exposing, and destroying the countinuos lies, fabrications, and distortions of the Progressive Left and their media whores.
What you need to do is find a rancher that wants to thin the gopher population in one of his fields. Hitting one of those at 100 yards is good shooting, plus you have experience in estimating distances and making adjustments, the occasional moving targets, and background awareness. Let the wife and kid join in with the .22, it’s fun and a service to mankind.
Plus you can practice your Bill Murray as Carl Spackler, “Au revoir, gopher.”
Lee, out of curiosity, what kind of scope, if any, do you use for shooting gophers at 100yards? My scope is a 1-6×24; I would think you’d probably want a little more magnification?
Jeff, what if instead of zombies we end up facing mummies?
They can throw spears and they move silently and can track across an ocean. It’s REALLY hard to get ahold of proper incendiary weapons, (molotov’s and road flares can be really dangerous), or those magical egyptian telescoping spears.
If it’s vampires, load your brass with sharpened pencils. Or if the graphite in the pencil lead is a problem, sharpen plain wooden dowels of the proper diameter.
I know they say silver works, but silver bullets only kill werewolves. And parties.
Jeff, look for a varmint scope.
They can be from 4-16x 40(mm) to 10-40x 50(mm) scope. It’s fairly long distance shooting.
Usually you’d want to use a .22 LR or .22 Hornet or maybe a pistol carbine for vermin(prairie dogs, voles, rats. squirrels)
.223 is good for coyotes, wild dogs, smaller boars like javelinas or peccaries and larger skunks.
If it’s mummies, we can probably distract them with falafels and sweet tea until we figure out a way to break the curse.
Which I’d bet means Israel has to go.
Thanks, palaeomerus. I figured it was something along those lines. The scope I have is a combat rifle scope. Different needs, unless we go to war with extremist prairie dogs.
I have a .22LR now. The scope I have on it I’m not terribly happy with. It’d do better on a pistol.
” If it’s vampires, load your brass with sharpened pencils. Or if the graphite in the pencil lead is a problem, sharpen plain wooden dowels of the proper diameter.”
I’ve always wondered if vampires might justify an air compressor charged pneumatic tube fired crossbow bolt sort of thing. Maybe you could load dowels from a quiver on the the side with a pump action type motion, charge the air bladder from your tank (which you’ve charged earlier with an air compressor, pull the trigger at around the same speed as you’d fire off a tube of 12 gauge ammo? Of course you’d probably need to be hauling something like a scuba tank around with you.
This makes me want to research producing working (if hazardous and unrealibale) post apocalyptic weapons from salvaged crap. I assume there will be no readily available mig welding due to a lack of power and/or self feeding copper wire electrode but you could probably solder stuff with tin foil and a iron bar that is heat insulated at one end if you had some wood or charcoal.
BTW Jeff my varminting advice is from the perspective of a guy in Austin who grew up with some relatives in the country and so learned about rat potting( we left the prairie dogs alone, and besides that there weren’t any around that I knew of ) which is largely recreational.
If you have more serious varminting needs like protecting a garden that you regularly eat from, if you are facing a local hanta virus outbreak, or it is snake season, then you might want to ask somebody with a more business/agricultural point of view.
I might be pointing you at some rinky dink type hobbiest scopes that a real varmint shooter would sneer at. I have no idea.
I DO know that a larger objective lens means more light reaches your eye which means a clearer image, which I assume would be handy if your goal is to shoot little brown things on brown stuff far away.
Varmint scopes seem to be around $100. I’d try to get a weather-proof /water proof one that is easy to adjust the magnification on.
Ahhh, I’m no expert. I grew up poor, learning what I got. Haven’t really even done much shooting since I’ve been in California. My dad would take me out as a teenager pretty regularly, and I could hit a gopher at 100 yard with his Savage 30-06 he bought from the JC Penny’s catalog in the sixties. I have no idea what scope was on it, but it had good optics, non-adjustable, with fine cross hairs. Usually I used my Winchester .22 with a 4x scope, and inside 80yards.
My proudest moment was knocking a gopher out of a sage bush at 80 yards…with a .58 black powder gun and iron sights that required you hold a mite left. Wish I still had that gun, it was a blast!
Learn to us what you got is my point. if you can thwart extremist prairie dogs, even those low profile crawling Zombies are easy shots.
Maybe the key to mummies is everybody bum rushes them, one at a time, and then you tie them up with chicken wire and crazy glue them to something really heavy like a dumpster and leave them stuck there as a warning to Peruvian princes that wander too far from their heavenly reward. or we could seal them in lucite and sell them as huge grisly souvenirs besides the pecan logs and jelly jars full of deer spice?
Different needs, unless we go to war with extremist prairie dogs.
Or Lilliputian jihadis.
If you hit a gopher with a 30-06, how would you know except for the pinkish mist?
Oh, if that business man was immune or resistant then you might be a murderer. In theory. Of course if he was a vampire then your shot didn’t kill him. And he’s powerful enough to walk in daylight. If he has a sense of humor and realizes that you were tryin to help then I guess you’re okay. If not…
And in the worst of all cases he might be a terminator or an Organian.
“If you hit a gopher with a 30-06, how would you know except for the pinkish mist?”
The burning tail and the little puff of smoke floating above the tiny crater.
Ha! you shoulda seen what was left after the .58! Killed and skinned in one easy step.
loaded with 145 gr. .308 mil surplus ammo…
You should try putting some of those on paper, from sandbags.
I’d be surprised if they grouped much better than two inches, so your current performance is probably about as good as you can reasonably expect to get.
I’m learning to use what I have. The point is, I’m not sure I could see a gopher at 100 yards, even at 6x.
Who knows? I guess if I can see a man’s head I can see a gopher. I just figured it’d be better to magnify the thing a bit more.
This is refreshing. It’s been a good long while since I’ve seen someone suffering so acutely from the early stages of gun nuttery. Oh the memories.
Carry on.
Those are pretty decent shots, no? I’m relatively new to this, remember.
ot language
Special Olympian Responds to Ann Coulter ‘Retard’ Tweet
free dictionary
re·tard 1 (r-tärd)
v. re·tard·ed, re·tard·ing, re·tards
v.tr.
To cause to move or proceed slowly; delay or impede.
v.intr.
To be delayed.
n.
1. A slowing down or hindering of progress; a delay.
2. Music A slackening of tempo.
good shooting mr. g. the obamapolycollapse awaits you.
John Franklin Stephens, Special Olympics Athlete, Pens Open Letter To Ann Coulter Over ‘Retard’ Remark
the mentally retarded are retarded. my sister at 43 ain’t effin’ einstein. eff proggtards.
Ahh man, thanks for the lol
Well, you should be confident that you can make an airway for a badguy with an obstruction from 100 yards.
Also, thanks for addressing the M.O. question the other night, I’m fully sold on its efficacy for pre-zombies and the links to the 3-D skulls w/stuffing made me realize I have to visualize shooting the brain’s nutsack through my targets rather than just shooting my targets in the face.
Nice shooting Jeff. As you continue to log in range time, I think you’ll find that concentrating on the basics of trigger control, stock weld, and breath control will improve your shooting more than the optics you choose. A scope only helps you see better, not shoot better.
Thanks, ironpacker. I love the reticle and scope, but I’ve really been concentrating on my breathing and smoothing out my trigger pull. This is a stock trigger for a battle rifle, but so far I have no complaints. A friend of mine inside the industry is looking to find me a nice specialty trigger, but there’s no rush.
Good comment ironpacker. Shooting is a bit of an art, and getting the mechanics down at the range is good, but I think getting out in the field is very helpful too. It teaches what adjustments to make when you aren’t shooting at a precise distance on level ground in calm air.
Just my two cents…
That was Thomas’s point. If you were shooting from a bench rest (more or less eliminating the mechanics of the shooter) your groups wouldn’t be much tighter or at least not too much tighter.
Zombies don’t care if the entries from the double-tap can be covered by a dime.
Also, you realize that you totally missed the medulla on Mr. Businessman Lunch, I hope.
That’s okay though, I’m sure in a real Zombie outbreak, you’d be using 168 gr JHP or Polymer Tip.
He was a zombie, or at least turning. The shot did its job.
Incidentally, I have some new targets to try out later today. The heads on the situational targets measure in at about 4×7, which means that in effect I’ll be taking medulla oblongata shots at roughly the equivalent of 200-220 yards. So, new challenge, especially with a 6x scope. It’s designed to make head shots out to about 300 yards, but it’s not designed necessarily to put that shot into a small trapezoid at that range.
So I look forward to the challenge going forward.
Ya gotta admitt though, it would at least be novel to see a newly reanimated corpse missing the upper right rear quadrant of it’s skull.
Have fun with your new targets.
Jeff,
One of these in 3-9×50 mildot is good for the pesky varmints – I have one on my .22 and it’s been great value for money. 80 yd bunnies are a breeze.
I now prefer to think that the business guy was a necromancer and shooting him in the throat (and probably severing his spine with a .308 in the neck) “broke his concentration” allowing his undead minions to turn on him, as he panics, and make a grisly feast of their former master.
A nice write-up on the .22 LR.
If only my Kel-Tec PMR 30 would behave correctly (or if I could find the perfect .22 Mag manufacturer’s round this little beast can digest without screwing up too often) I’d be happy with it. Carrying 30 rounds of .22 Mag in the magazine is a formidable concealed carry solution, but only if you can count on the damned thing cycling every time…
Heh. I once accompanied a friend who was sighting in his new Sako 7mm Rem Mag. At 500 yards, we placed one bright-orange shotgun clay on the side of the dirt embankment that served as backstop. He was having difficulty hitting the target; I leisurely raised my .45 ACP up about 20″ and nailed the thing. Creating those sorts of sour looks is my specialty!
That was a nice write-up. Kinda makes me wish I could just pop off to the local shooting sports emporium and pick up a Ruger SR-22 (the pistol, not the AR doppelganger).
Alas, just atttempting to hold the thing would make me violently nauseous.
My mini-luv provided mental health advisor tells me that the nausea is part of the cure.
How many times did it bounce before it hit the clay?