Consistency

I've discovered what separates the good shooters from the mediocre shooters. (Or the really good from the pretty good, if you prefer.) It's not the ability to shoot well, 'cause you have to shoot well to shoot, say, a 350 on a light rifle target, the dividing line between marksman and sharpshooter. And it's not just the ability to shoot 10's. For example, last night during my club's light rifle competition, I managed to shoot two 10's on the last bull on a target. On each of those, I fully intended to make the shot a 10 because I needed to make those two 10's. I needed to pull what was looking to be a miserable 83-85 target up to a barely-acceptable 87.

Of course, what frustrates me is that, if I can pull out those 10's when I really need to, why can't I do it every time? Why am I not shooting 100's on every target? Why did I have to work so hard to pull that target up to an 87? And this brings me to the difference between the good and the mediocre: consistency. The good shooters can pull off those 10's far more consistently than I can. They're not dropping the occasional shot down into the 7 ring.

This statement becomes obvious at the extreme end of the scale. For a 400 target, every shot is a 10. The mean is 10, the median is 10, and the standard deviation is 0. This is perfect consistency.

But consider a score that's below perfection but still a very good score, a 380. Each target scores on average a 95, each bull a 19. For each 9 you shoot, you have to be able to pull out a 10 to stay on track. Dropping a shot into the 7 ring means that you need to shoot six 10's to bring yourself back up to where you need to be.[1] And given that you have ten shots on target, the dropped shot only leaves you nine shots from which to pull those six 10's.

Now go farther down to a 360. Each target scores, on average, a 90. For a shooter who otherwise shoots 9's, every 10 gives him leeway to shoot an 8. Two 10's can afford him to drop a shot into the 7 ring without harm. This shooter can likely shoot a 6 and still pull out a 360.

So all I need to do now to pull myself up from a 360 (my latest official score from our light rifle competition) to a 400 is learn how to shoot consistently.



1. Put another way, you'd need to bring three of your succeeding 9's up to 10's. But you already needed three 10's to match those 9's, which makes six. And that's assuming you dropped a 10 to a 7. If you'd dropped a 9 to a 7, that would mean two 9's to 10's.

Mothers-in-law and hoplophobia

So, my wife informs me that my mother-in-law now refuses to enter our house. She has yet to have the discussion with my wife that she's threatening to have, but that will come at some point.

I'm curious to know why she refuses to enter the house. The obvious assumption is that it's a safety issue, but I don't think that's it. I think it's purely a moral issue, that guns are bad. The irony here is that my mother-in-law is Jewish and very pro-Israel. (I'm not Jewish, but my wife is, and, by implicit agreement from long before we were ever married, so are my kids.) She has relatives living in Israel who, no doubt, have guns in their homes. She's visited them, and I assume that she was aware that there were guns there. But that's no doubt a different situation.

Even though she won't enter the house, she will still come to pick up the kids to take them for an overnight. I'm tempted to refuse to let my kids enter her house. As compared to a house that contains guns locked up in a safe, her house is a death trap. The stairs to the second floor alone are excessively dangerous: they're very steep, and I've slipped and fallen on them. Some grandchild of hers is likely to fall and break something on them at some point, if not worse.

But that would simply be escalation and unlikely to ameliorate the situation. I certainly wouldn't be doing anything to win her over to reason with that approach.

Unfortunately, she's unlikely to ever have a reasonable attitude with respect to guns. She's well-known for always being right, no matter what anyone else says. She has an absolute inability to see things from a different point of view.

Oh, well, I'm sure this isn't the end of things. I'm not ruling out cutting her off from the grand-kids. Moving elsewhere would probably be the most effective way to achieve that. Especially if it's someplace like Texas. Mmmmmmm, Texas.

Amazing shooting

Okay, so maybe it's not that amazing for other people, but this was pretty significant for me.

I went this afternoon to practice for my club's light rifle competition. I shot a 368, consisting of a 94, 93, 93, and an 88. I was disappointed that I dropped so low on the last target, 'cause after the third target I had visions of shooting a 370. I would have been astounded had I done so, but I'm still pretty excited that I managed to shoot a 368.

(As some measure of what this means, 368 is the lower limit for the Expert classification for light rifle standing. Given that I'm currently shooting Marksman, that would mean skipping Sharpshooter altogether. Assuming, of course, that I could shoot 368 or better consistently in competition, which I haven't done yet. But it is nice to see that I'm making significant progress.)

Tuesday night shooting

I shot pretty well in last night's light rifle match. Unofficially a 357 (88, 88, 89, 92.) I was a bit disappointed that I didn't break 360, but this is still the best I've done so far. And I'm convinced it was the cheap ammo I was using that was holding me back (last week I shot a 332 with the cheap stuff. I can't imagine I've changed 25 points' worth in a week, so it's got to be something else.)

Mothers-in-law and guns

Mother-in-law has discovered that I own guns. We've tried to keep this
from her, and we've been remarkably successful. But I think this was
mostly because the guns were kept in their cases (locked) up in my
office, and she never goes into that corner of the house. But she
happened to walk through the garage on Saturday morning and saw the
recently-installed gun safe.

As some background, my mother-in-law has very definite opinions about
certain things, mostly concerned with what people do and don't do. Or,
to be more specific, what decent people do and don't do. These
opinions are simply prejudices based on her experience growing up
in a middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia surrounded by decent people.

As additional background, she doesn't always handle things in the most
mature of manners. For example, when a boy of the wrong religious
affiliation called my wife at home when she was in high school, her
mother sulked about it for weeks. As another example, when my
father-in-law bought a pool table some years ago, she was unhappy.
(Decent people don't even play pool, much less have a table in their
house.) She made him put it in a very cramped corner of the basement
where it was impossible to make a decent shot. She then proceeded to
move a freezer right next to the pool table, making it even harder to
use.

So I now wait to see what my punishment will be for having guns in the
same house as her grandchildren. This should be an interesting
experience, as I've not yet really been in the doghouse with her (even
after 10 years, and even though I don't have the correct religious affiliation.)

OTOH, this could be a good thing. I wouldn't mind moving somewhere
with better gun laws and lower taxes. This could open up my options.

Good shooting

Woohoo! I actually shot a 360 this afternoon. That currently stands as my best score on the light rifle target.

So, how'd I get there? Yesterday, I was shooting with my fairly-stock 10/22. (It's had some minor part replacements, but I've not replaced the barrel.) My shooting was pretty abysmal, low 80's and high 70's. I decided to try my heavy-barreled 10/22 this afternoon. I still didn't shoot well, a 332. Benchrest showed a larger grouping than that barrel should produce, so I tried some Eley Target ammo I'd gotten recently (rather than the el-cheapo ammo I'd been using.) That made a significant difference. I shot a 91, 90, 88, and 91 for that 360.

It remains to be seen if I can reproduce that, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Reading

When I started this blog, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to write enough to justify it. Then I surprised myself by writing on average more than once a day for a couple of months. I slowed down a bit due to taking a couple of weeks of vacation (during one of which I had the kids to myself), but the other major impact is that I've been reading a lot lately.

I just finished Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom. This is one of those classics that everyone should read. He makes the case that any type of state that attempts to plan some part of our lives must necessarily[1] end up planning all parts of our lives. Furthermore, he argues that a state of this nature must necessarily attract the worst kind of people to its leadership (thugs, essentially.) There's obviously more to the book, and it's definitely worth a read.

I'm also on the verge of finishing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. It was fairly interesting reading these two books at the same time. He covers a lot of early 20th century American history that I'd been unaware of (or possibly managed to forget since high school.) He argues that, rather than conservatives being Fascists, as every protester of the last 8 years would have us believe, it's actually liberals that have far more in common with the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.

Next on the list: Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.

[1] Modulo his comments about the inevitability of planning.

Self-defense dream

I had my first (or at least first that I remember) self-defense dream last night. Details aside, when it came down to pulling the trigger, I couldn't do it. Not in a moral sense, my finger just wouldn't pull the trigger.

It's probably purely coincidental that I shot really poorly during my club's light rifle competition last night. I just never could get the trigger to break when I wanted it to. My final target was a 78, a good 10 points below where I want to be (and where I've been shooting, so it's not an unreasonable expectation.) Pbbbbbt!

Rapid fire better than slow fire

Well, okay, it's a bit premature to say that, and it probably wouldn't hold up if I were to do a serious long-term comparison of the two. But it was an interesting experience.

I was shooting Sunday afternoon, practicing for my club's Light Rifle competition. I'd done reasonably well on the first set of targets (a 344.) I did reasonably well on the first two targets of the second set, an 86 and an 89. Then I shot a 79 on the third target. This was probably a result of still being tired from the 10-hour snowy drive of the day before, but I just couldn't make any decent shots. I got frustrated (again, probably from being tired), and I shot the last target in rapid-fire mode, just firing as fast as I could while keeping the target in my sights. I probably fired all 10 rounds in a minute, maybe less.

And I shot an 86.

Snow

There's nothing quite like driving 150 miles on the PA Turnpike in the dark while it's pouring down snow. Unless you've already spent hours driving through the same on mountains in Virginia and West Virginia.

Mustang

I drove to West Virginia today to celebrate my uncle's 91st birthday. My wife and I have only one car (since I commute to work by train, and the train station is less than ten minutes by foot from our house), and I couldn't leave my wife without a car for two days, so I rented a car.

Instead of renting some generic small or mid-size car, I decided to rent a Mustang. I've never had the chance to drive an American muscle car for any extended period of time (five minutes once doesn't really count), so I figured I'd make use of this opportunity.

Thursday evening, I went to pick up the car. Did all the paperwork, got a parking spot number, and walked out to find it. It wasn't hard to find. It was the BRIGHT BLUE Mustang sitting there in the parking lot. Not some generic shade of gray, not black, not white, BRIGHT BLUE.

On the way out of the lot, the attendant commented on it. "Nice car. And nice color, too."

I got home and told me wife to go look at the car. "No, I'm cooking, and the kids are leaving me alone. I'll look at it later." "No, really, go look at it." So she went to the window and looked. The laugh that came out was a purely unintentional, caught-by-surprise laugh. The laugh came out of her before she even thought to make fun of me for it.

It's been getting a similar reaction from assorted family members of various degree here, too.

But you know what? It drives like any other Mustang out there, so I don't really care that much.

91 years old

Tomorrow, I'll be going to the a birthday party for my uncle, who's turning 91. I would have seen him at my parents' over Thanksgiving, but he'd gone hunting and bagged a turkey, and his neighbor offered to cook that for him, so he stayed home.

He's quite a character. He's obviously still pretty mobile, and he's definitely still pretty sharp. And, at 91, he probably has a stronger grip than I do.

He served as a pilot in the war (WWII, that is.) He was shot down over Germany and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

I don't know how much longer he'll be around, so when I heard they were throwing this shindig for him, I figured I'd do what I could to be there.

The power of bureaucrats

I spent Thanksgiving at my parents, during which time I got to see my brother and his family. Some fifteen years ago, my brother's wife started a day care center that she's been running since then. She's now essentially been forced to give it up because some petty little bureaucrat got a bug up her butt.

Apparently, a couple of years ago, the day care center was assigned a new bureaucrat from the county to do their evaluations. The first visit from said bureaucrat went swimmingly -- she was delighted with how the center was run. Unfortunately, her boss didn't like her findings and came back for another visit with said bureaucrat. Things didn't go well this time, and evaluations went poorly every time thereafter. The one time that my sister-in-law commented on how well the visit was going because the evaluator hadn't found anything wrong, the response was, "And I'm not leaving until I do."

So, finally, after a two-year campaign to shut down this day care center, the bureaucrat has won. And now all of those parents have to find other places for their children, and the employees have to find other jobs. You just gotta love the power that these people hold.

Fortunately, this was an isolated incident, and nobody need fear treatment like this once our new health care system has been put in place.

Tuesday night's Light Rifle

So, this last weekend, I shot a 352 and a 354. I didn't do quite as well in the Tuesday night match. I shot (unofficially) a 343. To keep perspective, though, it's still where I want, which is to be shooting consistently in the 340's.

One of the guys I was shooting with (a Master-class shooter) shot a 98 on one of his targets. That's some impressive shooting. But he is human, though -- his final two shots on his last target were 7's, both pretty much accidental shots.

Compassionate conservatives

I read this article over at the Volokh Conspiracy. This anecdote jumped out at me:

Senior year of college, I took a political economy class from a very left-wing, but very fair-minded, Sociology professor. One of the books he assigned was David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics. Stockman was a libertarian Republican who served as Reagan’s first budget director. At the beginning of the book, he provided a concise summary of why he thought limited government was beneficial to the American people. When the class discussed the book, one of my fellow seniors exclaimed, “This was very interesting to me! He seems like a good guy... I didn’t know that any conservatives actually cared about people!.” Kudos to this professor for enlightening my classmate, but how does someone get to her senior year of college without being exposed to the radical idea that not all conservatives are innately evil?

While I'm certainly not shocked that someone in her senior year of college would have led so sheltered a life, I do consider it a failure of that university (and most universities) that there should be so little diversity of thought that this should happen.

One of my friends, who earned Ph.D.'s in both economics and political science, once told me about visiting an older uncle of his who'd never been to college. My friend told me of some of the opinions his uncle had offered and how they demonstrated that he'd never really had anyone seriously challenge him on them. Unfortunately, it appears that going to college wouldn't necessarily prevent that nowadays.

(As an aside, this reminds me of a conversation I once had with my sister-in-law. She's a typical northeast liberal who went to Columbia, quite possibly the most liberal of the liberal northeastern universities. She actually said to me, and I kid you not, "Republicans ... oh, I hate them so much!" The last time I'd heard a line like that was in some bad Saturday morning cartoon. And she was obviously assuming that I shared her political opinions. But then, why shouldn't she? She'd probably never met someone who didn't.)