Josh and Henry at 9-Hole do a speed run with a SCAR 17 on their practical accuracy course. It takes them about a minute and a half to clear targets.
The rest of the video is the breakdown of the shooting itself. It’s 30 minutes of good discussion on on rifle, the ammo, the environment, and how everything involved blends together into a shot.
Why is this important?
Because shooting is a process.
A gun alone won’t make for tight groups and fast splits. Neither will a round, an optic, a trigger, or anything else. Building the whole gun into an effective system, one to aid you in your shot process, is the key combined building yourself into a shooter that can take advantage of that aided shot process.
We’ve seen what optics can do in a vacuum. The improvements to amatuer shooters’ scores and times are obvious and dramatic. Teaching the whole integrated system produces the best results.
That takes knowing your gun, and why you built it up the way you did. That takes knowing how to take advantage of the gear you put on your gun and knowing how to read the basics of your environment. All those combine into a swift and accurate shot process that lands rounds where you need them. Letting any element of those slip will result in slop, the more slop the less accuracy and speed.
“Grouping”
This post came about for two reasons. The first was my like of the video.
The second was an answer to an inquiry I answered out in the interwebz.
A shooter came wondering about their groupings in a Facebook group. But they weren’t set up for groupings. They weren’t set up to run a solid evaluation on groupings. They just put optic on target and squeezed the trigger (which, to be fair, is the system you’re building).
But they didn’t isolate for factors, they threw it all into the pot and sent it and then wanted to compare it to more isolated results. Apples to oranges comparison.
You know the type, you’ve seen them in comments and forums.
“Hey, I put a reflex optic onto a rifle and shot some sketchtastic ammo. My groups are kinda… meh… is that normal?”
Yes, that is exactly the equation you set the rifle up for. With a sketchy send it setup if you’re keeping it minute of target you’re doing alright. You have not isolated the accuracy factors to start judging various items as problematic, there are simply too many that could be the problem to say any one of them is the problem. They are probably all the problem with a less than stellar performance out of a rifle.
The rifle in question isn’t known for spectacular accuracy, but it is overly maligned for the wrong reasons too. People like to jump onto internet trending “common knowledge” instead of working to isolate factors and work within a system. Someone will show an 8-10″ group on a target with trash grade ammunition, a maxed brightness dot, and unable to break a shot off the rifle without jerking it, and blame the rifle.
They’ll contrast that with a different rifle, often that others shot better, under much better data collection conditions, and say one or the other system is superior or inferior. Apples to oranges comparisons.
Anyway, the long, the short, and the middle of it is that this video is a great explanation of all the environmental and shooter conditions that go into making a good system. It also creates an environment where it becomes easy to diagnose errors and thereby much easier to correct those errors. That is crucial state for building and refining a system, and knowing its role and limits.
