Strike a Pose; no One Cares if You Actually Hit Anything

I have to give Romney credit. Few politicians would be patriotic enough to bail this early in the campaign, if they had any shot at all at winning. He's in big trouble, but he could conceivably have won. Now we're left with the egotists and kooks. Whether or not Romney did the smartest thing, he showed a lot more character than I thought he had.

Back to shooting. Here is a fun comment, from "Paladin."

Holy Crap... this has to be one of the funniest things I've read in a loooong time. Thanks! I don't have the budget for expensive/fancy guns, so I'm drawn to "beaters with potential". I get the same reaction from some "purists" when I duracoat and/or modify old abused guns.

Of course, they generally shut up when I shoot circles around their $1100 gems with my $200 Star BM surplus pistol

I responded in a comment, but I wanted to expand on it.

You've seen my most recent targets, so you know that at this point in time, I shoot well but not phenomenally well. In the past I've shot considerably better, but at my best, using a Glock .40 S&W or a Smith & Wesson .357, I kept all the rounds in an area four or five inches in diameter, shooting at 50 feet. Still, I have found that more often than not, I shoot better than anyone else present on a given day. Most people can't shoot worth a damn. And that includes the snobby camo wearers and the cops, who show up in starched white dress shirts and Italian sunglasses, with too much gel in their hair, and hit everything but the bullseye.

Is it just my imagination, or do a whole lot of cops dress and groom themselves a great deal like the late Freddie Mercury? That guy on Reno 911 who wears the tiny hot pants is based on real life cops, I can assure you. There is a 60-year-old cop who hangs out at the nearest marina, who dresses like he's trolling for quickies. If his shorts were any tighter or shorter, he could be mistaken for a Hooters waitress. Then there's the sixtyish steroid case who stands outside the nearest strip mall, looking for all the world like a cross between Brock Lesnar and Dale Gribble.

God bless the cops. They risk their lives for us daily. But come on, you know what I say is true.

Anyway, I have to wonder what percentage of guys who had to take Zantac and Imodium and Thorazine after reading about my pimp gun plans could hit the broad side of a barn with a handful of cow shit. If the snobs down here generally shoot badly, I assume that's the case everywhere. Well, except in the South, where it seems like everyone pops out of the womb with a fairly decent aim. What's more important? Shooting "right," or shooting well?

Yesterday the guy shooting next to me started a conversation, and he ended up showing me a sweet first-generation S&W 1911. He was shooting some kind of Parkerized automatic in a small caliber. Maybe 9mm. Anyway, he was a very nice guy--didn't seem snobby--and I am not trying to insult him, but he was shooting at 7 yards, and the distance between the two most widely separated holes was about 15 inches. There was no pattern at all. Just dozens and dozens of random perforations cluttering the central square foot of the paper. It was clear that he was a longtime shooter, and that he didn't mind spending money on his hobby. I had to wonder...could he possibly be unaware of how badly he was shooting? How can you shoot like that and not do something about it? You could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had some physical problem or other, but most people at the range shoot about like he did, and they look fine to me. Wouldn't you get some lessons if you were in that shape? I assume anyone can shoot better than that with instruction.

I don't understand shooters and the whole shooting mindset. Maybe they're like writers. Like I alway say, lots of people call themselves writers, but most of them don't write anything, and most who do, don't do it well enough to justify the effort. It's about being and calling yourself a writer; it's not about writing well. I suppose shooting and all other human activities are the same way. It's like the guys in weight rooms who sit on leg press machines, use the maximum setting, begin with their legs nearly straight, and go home and tell people they maxed out the machine. Okay, I guess so, but you're still weak, so who cares?

Maybe gun customizing is like high end audio, full of tweaks that do a lot to make vendors rich but very little to improve performance. Maybe shooting is 99% man and 1% machine. Maybe I should be very hesitant to do anything to make my guns more accurate, until I feel like I've fixed my bad habits. If posers are so common, it stands to reason that the manufacturers know about it and deliberately sell them stuff that doesn't really help.

Thanks for the comment, Paladin. Keep enjoying that cheap hardware. I hope you make the snobs feel twice as bad as they try to make you feel.