What challenged you to learn to shoot accurately and...

[Gibbshooter43]

I'm curious about what challenged us to shoot accurately, and at what age did it happen? For me it was duying my preteen years. I thought it was enough to just hit something and I was proud of my ability to do that. My dad had taught me to shoot and to practice all the important safety practices. One day in the midst of my bragging, my dad quietly asked me to put one of those old "light on anything" matches in the crotch of a tree 30 or 40 yards away. He then proceeded to light the match with one shot. I was humbled, and challenged to practice to shoot as well as he did: hence the "aim small" in my signature. As I grew older the challenge was to do that at greatly increasingly distances. His example lives on today. So how about you...

 

[KyCarl]

Cost? every shot has to count! No Quail not worth a 12Ga. shell! One day I got
4 Cock Pheasants and 5 Rabbits with 10 shots with a old 1897 pump!
My dad and uncle wanted to know why not 9?

 

[nt7332]

I was raised a hunter and killing animals for table fare was a very big priority in my house. Because of this I practiced shooting religiously and mind you this was back in the day with lever guns and Walmart scopes. Once I got older and got into reloading, reloading then drove my shooting. Doing test loads and tweaking and continually upgrading rifles and scopes while at the same time getting better and better at reloading practices. I mean who aims at something to miss right. I am definelty hung up on low ES and small groups so that is my challenge every time I make a bullet or pull the trigger now days.

 

[milo-2]

I hope I don't dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back here. I have been a decent shot since I was young, biggest problem was holding interest in doing so. I could shoot gophers all day long and stay interested with a 22. One round of trap has always been enough for me, score great, any after becomes boring. It is the same with me shooting pool, one good game, lol. Pistol shooting I could stay in the game and have fun, not so much today though.
I was introduced to LR shooting roughly 10 yrs ago, I love it. Though it has cost a small fortune, today I shoot extremely accurate rifles and loads. Even after 10 yrs, I find myself speeding a little to get to the range, yes!
I do not care to shoot animals today myself, but I take a few LR hunting with my rifles. If they prove they can shoot, and listen to me, all has went great so far. I have brought a lot of guys into precision long range shooting, and felt right at home helping them spend exorbitant amounts of money doing so.
By nature, I am an extremely helpful person, but my tolerance level wanes more these days on the range with certain types of guys. You know the ones that are bad, have a bad rifle, well that 5" plate hanging at 800 is bad too, let's see what you got.

 

[KyCarl]

Remember Trap is not one round of 25 targets! In the big leagues if you can't break 398 X 400 any given weekend you better save your entry fee!
Those guys shoot like machines!

 

[milo-2]

Remember Trap is not one round of 25 targets! In the big leagues if you can't break 398 X 400 any given weekend you better save your entry fee!
Those guys shoot like machines!

Lol, 1 rd of 25 was enough get me ready for, grouse, pheasant or geese seasons. I'd cut my weinie off before I joined a trap league, again.

 

[Jud96]

My Dad was always and still is one of the best shooters I've ever witnessed. Some of my earliest memories is of him teaching me how to shoot my old Stevens drop block .22 rifle. He constantly pushed safety and to aim small and hit small. Every time we went out it was my goal to try and match his shooting ability. He slowly transitioned me from 22s to high power rifles and the targets got smaller and harder to hit. We use to spend hours shooting and reloading for old military rifles and they all had iron sights of course. I never got interested in "sporting rifles" until he started taking me out and shooting them at long range. We shot long range a lot with open sights, but I really got hooked on shooting far with precision rifles when I could go from hitting a milk jug at 300 yards with open sights, to dang near taking the lid off with a scoped precision rifle. From then on I became obsessed with accuracy and precision rifles.

The year before Dad started teaching me to shoot far and build drop sheets and use my turrets for adjustments, is when I lost my first and only deer to date with a rifle. I was young and unfamiliar with actual ballistics and bullet drop. My Dad sat me up to watch a woods edge about 100 yards away. A buck stepped out at 300ish yards at the far end of the field. I wasn't good at estimating ranges and had no clue how much my bullet dropped. My Dad wasn't there to help, so when I aimed on that buck's shoulder, I actually hit him low and just clipped his chest. We tracked him for over a mile until we lost his trail and that's all it took for me to get serious and start learning my rifle and improving my skills. The following year I took a big bodied half rack at 250 yards (far for me at the time) with the same rifle, this time I was confident and knew how to make a clean, proper shot. Since then I have improved my rifles, skills, and knowledge on long range shooting and strive to be the best hunter and shooter I can be.

 

[Deputy819]

So, one snowy morning when I was a teenager working for a boarding and training kennel (Labradors) the owner (practically my Dad) said, "Let's go drive over to the farm and see if anything is moving". It was smack dab in the middle of modern gun season for deer. I beat him to the truck and He got in the driver side toting his trusty Remington 760 chambered in .270 loaded with factory ammo. It only took 5 minutes to get to the farm we leased and when we arrived at the gate we were overlooking a large soybean bottom. There standing in the middle of that bottom looked to be a very nice buck. He immediately threw open his door and laid the rifle in the "V" made by the door and the A-pillar and took aim. The shot looked impossible to my young, inexperienced eyes and I said ,"You're not gonna shoot are ya"? His only response was, "Watch where he goes". I immediately threw my hands up to cover my ears just in time to hear a "POP". The buck flinched and dropped where he stood. I could only stare in wide-eyed wonder. What had just happened was truly amazing. I asked him how in the world he had made that shot and he just smiled at me and said, "You gotta know your gun". My friend estimated the shot at every bit of 600 yards. That did it for me...

 

[Shane Lindsey]

My dad taught at a young age with bb guns.

When I grew up and joined the military, I was privileged enough to shoot the good ones. I thought all bold actions were supposed to shoot this good.

When I got married my wife bought me my first bolt action hunting rifle. It did not shoot like an M40. A friend of mine turned me onto reloading and with a little patience most rifles will sing with enough effort...I was hooked.

Now if I was able to shoot just one cold bore and a follow up daily...that would be livin...

 

[gohring3006]

Mine started with archery 30 years ago I started, and a little later in my teen years I shot a thousand arrows a week.
I got bored when I could tune a bow in about 10 minutes. Then I went to rifles, and that one hole group was what I chased. I figured out, that I need something to tease my brain, it's not the shooting, it's the building of the ammo to get that one hole group. Same with archery, it wasn't shooting, it's making the bow shoot well.

 

[okie man]

I grew up with a recurve bow in my hand. At 13 I shot a ground squirrel at about 40 yards with it. I launched a hundred arrows at them before I got one. Lots of close misses kept me saying I could do this. After that I was introduced to handguns.
More so Thompson/center contenders. Just the thought of 100-300 yard shots with a handgun had me hooked. Soon I had a super 14 in 223 rem and I learned how to shot, reload and tinker with things. I learned about scopes. Some good, some bad. I had a 14" 45/70 barrel for a while. At the time not many pistol scopes were up to the recoil of that setup! But it was fun to shoot a couple times and then hand it to a new shooter. That was the extent of my firearms shooting for a long time.I'd bow hunt most of the time , usually filling my tags before rifle season started. If I did fill a rifle tag I'd use a pistol.
I really got interested in rifles about the time my son was old enough to shoot and he was really good at it. I got a nice cz527 223 and we both shot it and I added a few more guns to the collection. It's only been in the last 5 years I've put a lot of effort into long range shooting and the equipment for it. It's bern fun, but I spent more time working for accuracy than shooting.

 

[frostop]

For me it started when I was 12 or 13 with an old Benjamin .22 pump air rifle. My younger brothers and I would shoot match sticks stuck in the dirt at maybe 40 yds.
Than I bought my own 30.06 and started hunting, took a couple deer with that rifle, later bought the new version Ruger M77 in stainless, which I still have. Later I started elk hunting and one year I was shooting at a cow elk at maybe 400 yds (didn't have a range finder than), just holding high and just kept missing until she decided she didn't want to hang around till I got lucky. It was that day that I decided that I needed to konw what my rifle was doing at extended ranges and at the same time I took up handloading. My step father had an old Herter's press, powder charge, 30.06 dies and balance beam that he wasn't using anymore and I just took it upon myself to learn how to use it all, this was like 1985, now I have all new and reload for several cartridges. Than I took up archery hunting and chasing rutting/bugling elk which was intoxicating, killed a few elk with my bow than the **** wolves screwed that all up, at least were I hunt! Now I am back with the long range rifles and have built my own and have enjoyed shooting at longer ranges than I would have shot at years ago. Killed a deer at 520 yds a couple years ago and still haven't killed an elk with my rifle, just can't put the bow down.

 

[RetiredSniper]

U.S. ARMY Sniper Core.

 

[cynicrit]

I ran into a long range hunter who was a former sniper. We were at the range, I was zeroing my rifle, and he was sitting there with a skeptical look on his face. He asked if I was happy with 2 MOA groups, I replied that it was good enough for what I was doing, with a factory rifle and factory ammo. He asked if I minded if he shot a group. He shot 5 rounds and got a 1.25" group at the 100 yard line. The thing was, his group was tight, and symmetrical and his POI was different from mine. I said "Well, I reckon my shooting sucks." He said "No, you've just never been shown how." When I left 2 hours later I was not as ignorant, and that's when I really started studying up on this.