2 Minute Marksmanship Booster

The two following tips, properly applied, will immediately improve your handgun accuracy. A full explanation with additional tips and drills can be found in the book, The Perfect Pistol Shot.

1. Aim at a point which appears smaller than your front sight tip. In all my training classes, live-fire marksmanship instruction  is conducted with crosses drawn on the backside of targets. The center of the cross is your aiming point. The arms of the cross may be extended for better viewing at greater distances and the thickness of the lines may be enlarged through the use of a bigger marker, but the crucible remains your exact aiming point. Think about it. Your driving benefits from your ability to look down the road and make steering corrections. Shooting is the same. You handgun was designed to shoot 25 yard groups no bigger than the bottom of your coffee mug. You will never realize that mechanical potential while aiming at a 12" bulls-eye or  24" silhouette.  If you unknowingly fire to the right side of a giant bulls-eye on the first shot and slightly toward the top on the second shot, you will get a false reading when examining your target; you may have fired perfect shots but failed to anchor them to the same place and therefore fired a six inch spread. You can't shoot at pie plates, soda cans, and bleach bottles while expecting to learn anything from the experience.

2. Focus fanatically on the front sight tip. If you can't identify your used handgun from among a pile of the same make and model by examining the front sight tip, you aren't properly focusing on the front sight during firing. Every scratch, dent and ding should be impressed into your memory. The eye must tell the hand to make adjustments within hundredths of an inch. How can the eye do that with a casual glance. The front sight is on the end of the barrel. Wherever the end of the barrel is pointed at the instant the round leaves the weapon is where the bullet is going to travel. That's a scientific fact. Another scientific fact is this: control the front sight and you will control bullet placement. Every shooters says he knows about sight alignment and sight picture, but in my experience most shooters only know the purpose of the sights, not how to use them.

Master the above two skills and you'll be within the top ten percent of the world's handgun shooters.