Types of Shooting.

civdef

There's loads of different shooting sports out there, I'm interested to get a feel for what shooters here take part in.

Myself:

Competition Target Shooting;
10m Air Rifle, for a while in UCD, didn't particularly like it.
50m Prone, In UK, better than air rifle, not much facilities for it where I'm living now in Ireland.
Silhouette, Only getting to grips with this, difficult as hell, but enjoyable.

Informal Target Shooting;
22 and centrefire, competing against self, as often as possible.

Clayshooting;
Never got into the formal competiton end of things, enjoy local "flapper" shoots, and have a trap for informal practice at home.

Hunting;
Have shot pheasant, duck, snipe, deer at various stages, not very much for the last couple of years.

Vermin Shooting;
Crows, pigeon, rabbits, foxes, did a lot of this in the past, not as much now, but still go out occasionally.

mcguiver

Informal Target Shooting
+just started to dabble in Silhouette

Sparks

All ISSF for me,
10m Air Rifle (I'm somewhere between 550 and 560 at the moment)
50m 3P (barely broke the thousand last time and I'm not shooting it at the moment until I can afford to get a few more pieces of kit)
50m Prone (Haven't had the chance to train much in this, I put in a 549 at the Comber Open, but on a borrowed rifle - I must have lost nearly twenty points because of that)
25yd Prone (National Champion in 2001, but I don't shoot it much these days except as position training for 50m, though that'll change as I'm entering the UCESSA postal competition again this year).

I've shot ISSF pistol up north and sporter rifle once or twice, but never really felt challanged by them so just went back to (what I think is) the harder disciplines

fiacha

Shoot sporting clays mostly, but also enjoy rough shooting and wildfowling when I can get out.

Zakalwe

10m air rifle.
25yard prone. I only got to do this a few times last year as TCD had a dispute with security regarding storing live ammunition and only resolved it later in the year and also because the 25yard days (Thursday and Tuesday) fell on lecture nights.

I aim (no pun intended) to get a lot more range time in this year as I find the sport extremely relaxing and gratifiying.

Sparks

Zakalwe wrote:

25yard prone. I only got to do this a few times last year as TCD had a dispute with security regarding storing live ammunition and only resolved it later in the year

What actually happened was just that there was a slip-up in the paperwork (DURC have to track every .22 round fired, and normally we manage this, but this time someone miscounted the number of rounds delivered and there was a very large discrepency between the number on paper and the number in the locker), and it took forever to sort it out. There wasn't actually a dispute over storing the ammunition.

Renegade_Archer

10m Air Pistol and 10m Air Rifle for me, in a gun club here in Germany.


Managing 523 or there abouts with the pistol at the moment, only took up the rifle last night, so havnt started scoring with it yet, although most of my impact holes are at least touching each other, although the group keeps moving around the target :P

Bsaically my plan is this: I was going to go ahead and buy an IZH-46M airpistol, but Ive decided to delay that until the new firearms act comes out... so if airpistols are still legal I'll go ahead and buy the IZH, if not, I'll go with air rifle.


The one thing I dislike about air rifle is all the crap you have to wear when doing it seriously, I was doing it in a jeans and t-shirt, this dude beside me had special shoes, trousers(!), jacket, and gloves... in pistol shooting all I need is something over my left eye and thats it...

Sparks

Renegade_Archer wrote:

The one thing I dislike about air rifle is all the crap you have to wear when doing it seriously, I was doing it in a jeans and t-shirt, this dude beside me had special shoes, trousers(!), jacket, and gloves... in pistol shooting all I need is something over my left eye and thats it...

Well, pistol lads have the shoes as well. But the other stuff (the trousers, the jacket and the gloves) are primarily there to prevent chronic injuries. The jacket stabilises your spine while holding the rifle (as your spine is twisted, bent to the side and bent to the rear while supporting the rifle - what the docters call an assymetric offset loading), the trousers do the same for your lower spine (I didn't have them for some years and developed a chronic nerve problem in my right leg where a dermatrope was trapped between two vertabrae, leaving a hand-sized patch above my right knee permanently numb), and the glove protects your hands (I nearly developed the same problem because I was resting the rifle on the inside of my ring finger, on a nerve - happily once I altered my technique, the sensation returned).

But yes, it is a bit of a drag bringing all that gear about.
But you have to admit, it does make for a better photo than ten lads in shiny tracksuits

civdef

One side effect of all the gear needed for those disciplines is a daunting cost for a beginner with potential. The joys of clun gear soon wear thin, and gear needs to be well-fitting in any case, which club gear by it's nature probably won't...

Sparks

Yes, it's a drawback allright civ. We could do with a lower-cost entry to the sport (hence my enthuasiasm for air pistol being reintroduced, as that means you can have a World Class air pistol setup for about four hundred euros, less if you buy second-hand).

But on the other hand, the gear outlasts you in many cases - I mean, I bought my .22 rifle three years ago for around 1500 euros. But it will last me another seventeen years at least, so long as I don't drive over it. Amortized, that comes to 75 euro a year, and less if it lasts longer (the rifle I learnt to shoot on was about 35 years old and it's still able to outshoot me today, so that's about 45 years out of a rifle). The jackets don't last so long for air rifle, not if you want to be highly competitive (you're looking at two to three years at the World Cup level) but for a beginner, well, some of our club jackets are still quite usable ten years after getting them, and for prone, I know of one shooter whose jacket is older than I am, and he still puts in 580s easily with it.

Hagar

Vermin Shooting; Crows, pigeon, rabbits and Informal Target Shooting, I'm not a club member but hope to join one when I move to Mullingar in early October

Looper1

Anyone know why sporting is not shot at the Olympics, it seems to have the bigger following?

Zakalwe

After you customized a sporting rifle for high accuracy and consistency you'd probably end up with something looking exactly like a target rifle.

Sparks

He may have meant sporting clay pigeon shooting though Zak...

entropy

yeah i think he does too, makes me wonder why we cant get dtl added into the olympics as its fairly popular in places like australia and new zealand and theres not much of a difference between american trap and it only needs one trap unlike the trench stuff which needs 15.