I make no excuse for it: by both habit and choice, I'm a rifle shooter. I like the way a good rifle will put shot after shot within the bull, often touching each other. Somehow that helps satisfy the need for logic and order in my life.
But during the past 10 years I've matured as a shooter. Some days, I want to blast away at little clay birds and turn them into tiny pieces. The trouble is, I can't hit them. My rifle shooter's reflexes are so ingrained that I want to aim the gun rather than point it. By the time I figure out where the bird is and pull the trigger, the bird isn't there any more.
Recently I had the good fortune to attend a clinic by Steve Schultz during a hunt at White Oak Plantation in Alabama. Steve is the chief instructor for Federal Cartridge Company's Wing and Clay Shooting School, and I asked him how he helps students make the transition from rifle shooting to shotgunning.
We spent a rather remarkable afternoon during which I hit clay birds I never would have dreamed I'd come near, until a shooter's headache forced me to stop. Afterward I asked Steve how he achieves such great results with confirmed rifle shooters.
Proper Mounting
"The first thing I do is show a student how to mount a shotgun properly," he said. "You mount the shotgun to your face, not your shoulder. Then you put your shoulder into the gun."
It's a very small movement, but your shoulder should move forward. Drawing the gun into your shoulder pulls the skin under your eye and distorts your vision.
"You have to get your eye aligned over the rib. That's why you mount the gun to the face, so the rear sight is right underneath your eye, in the same place every time. If you change your mount, since your eye is actually the back sight on the shotgun, you're changing the elevation of the rear sight. It's the same as a rifle with a sliding ramp as the back sight. If you slide that ramp, you elevate the back sight. The same thing holds true with a shotgun. If you mount lower, you elevate your rear sight. Your left hand is going to compensate by bringing the barrel up to put everything back in the proper alignment. And it'll cause you to shoot high."
Once you have the shotgun in position, you also hold it differently. For example, you hold a rifle across your body. But with a shotgun, you hold it at right angles to your body.
"When you turn your body sideways, you have to turn your head, and your eyes," Steve said. "I'm trying to get you to shoot a shotgun with both eyes open, and very few rifle shooters will do that. When you turn to shoot across your body, you have to turn your head in order to get your eye in the right place. The other eye is not looking down the side of the barrel, it's actually looking across the barrel. Especially if you're cross- eye dominant, your other eye is going to try to bring that barrel over so it looks at the target over the end bead of the barrel."
He added, "When you close one eye, you lose 50 percent of your vision. It effectively makes the target half as big and twice as fast. Try it--the next time you see a target going though the air, take your hand and cover one eye. I guarantee the target will look like it picks up speed, and it's going to look smaller.
Sight Picture
Sight picture also is different for rifles and shotguns. We're talking here about iron sights on a rifle, not a riflescope. "I'm trying to get you to focus on the target, see the gun in your peripheral vision, and use your normal eye-hand coordination," Steve said.
An example is trying to hammer a nail by looking at the hammer. Think of the nail as the target and the hammer as the gun. What do you suppose would be the result if you watched the hammer and not the nail?
"That's a good representation of what you're trying to do when you sight a shotgun," he said. "If you're looking at the gun, you can't see the gun and target both clearly. Your eyes just are not capable of it." In other words, if the bead on the end of the barrel is in focus, you're looking at the wrong thing.
One trick Steve uses to illustrate this involves your finger and the end of your nose. He had me stand about three feet away from him and face him. "Look at my eyes," he said. "Don't look away. Now, take the index finger of your right hand and touch the tip of your nose." I could, of course, make the two connect.
"This shows you that your peripheral vision will take care of the gun, if you're concentrating on the target," he said.
One thing you don't have to change is your foot position--that is, if your feet are correct in the first place.
"The position basically is the same," Steve said. "But most people shoot a rifle wrong, because you usually have enough time to align the sights and you can move your head around. But with a shotgun it's all one fluid movement to a bird or to a clay target."
For lack of a better way to describe it, you should have your navel facing the spot where you intend to break the target or shoot the bird. That helps ensure that you get your shoulders in the correct position.
"You want to put your body in that position, or slightly beyond," he said. "You're not quite as fast as you think you are, and you want to give yourself that little extra freedom of movement to come on around."
In this position, put most of your weight on your forward foot. "But you don't want to stick that hip out over your foot," Steve said. "You want to center your body over your hips so when the gun discharges the recoil will go through your whole body and not all into your face. If you're already leaning back and there's no place for the recoil to go, the gun has no choice but to go up."
If you're leaned forward properly, the gun will push you back instead, and you'll have a lot less "felt" recoil.
Training the Hands
Another thing Steve does is get a shooter to train his or her hands. "We're training muscles to do repetitive movement, just like touching your nose with your finger," he said. "That way you bring the gun to the same spot on your face every time. It's an advantage to always start from the same position. Most people kind of roll their hands underneath and support the forearm in the palm of their hand. You don't need to do that with a shotgun. You hold a shotgun very gently, and point your index finger down the side of the forearm. We're using your natural pointing ability."
When you're shooting a rifle, unless you're taking one of those very rare moving shots, follow through is not an issue. But with a shotgun, it's an important part of the process.
"Most people don't realize how their brain works," Steve said. "When you make a conscious decision to pull the trigger, your visual image changes. Until that point, you've been seeing a video in real time. This afternoon, when I said I wanted you to shoot right at the target and you hit it, if you'll think about it mathematically, you know that's impossible. Because if the gun and the clay bird were in perfect alignment at the time you shot, from the time the shot left the barrel until it got to the target, the target had traveled about three feet. And the pattern on that shot is not that big. When gun got there, you made a conscious decision to shoot. Everything was in line, and your brain took a still picture.
"When the gun actually discharged, the barrel was over to your left. I built the follow through in for you and you just didn't realize it because you were not conscious of what we call 'shooter's time'--the time from the eye to the finger. On the average person, that's about half a second, and that half a second enables the barrel to get ahead of the target."
Learn to Focus
Another thing Steve does is encourage shotgunners to "focus" their vision.
"If you take a rifle shooter out and back him up 600 yards and tell him to shoot a barn, he'll hit it," he said. "If he shoots five shots he'll probably have a six-foot group. If you draw a little two-inch circle on the barn, he's not going to hit it every time but his spread will come down dramatically because he's making his vision come down sharp. That's what we're trying to get you to do with your eyes. I'm trying to get you to see the dimples in that clay target.
"When you're shooting live birds, I'm trying to get you to look at the eyes of the bird. That tells you two things: one, that you're looking at the right spot, at the leading edge or the front of the bird; two, with live birds, it also tells you that you're in range. If you can see his eyeballs, then you can kill him, whether it's a goose or a quail. If you can't see his eyes, he's probably too far."
All I can say is, Steve's method works. I saw several rifle shooters that day rave about how many targets they were able to hit when they followed his tips, tips he's developed over a number of years as a professional shotgunner and shotgun instructor.
For more information about the Federal Wing and Clay Shooting School, contact Steve Schultz at 703 Newton Drive, Richmond, Texas 77469, or call 713-342-1908. You also can leave a message for him at 800-888-WING.
Copyright (c) 1996 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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