Hi

Some of you may know me from other areas of the forum. For the last few years it has become a dream of mine to become a rifleman. Weather I have achieved that goal is for others to decide.

My goal is to spread the word: we can all master basic marksmanship and to do so requires only minor study.

The first thing i would like to discuss is practical riflery with the red dot sight. Their is a mythos about red dots and target obscurance that I never understood. Long considered to be a CQB sight, I found its utility far greater than any irons in a practical shooting sense.

If we take a red dot, a 50 yard zero, and utilize three repeatable holds, we can master hitting man sized targets at out to 400 yards repeatedly.



The chest represents our POA POI from 0-200 yards.

The head represents our POA for a 300 yard target, and 5.56 will drop handily into the upper chest.

The hat represents our POA at 400 yards whereby we visualize a top hat on the target and shoot it off thereby dropping rounds on the mid to lower torso.

These three holds do wonders to ensuring easy, "quick and dirty" hits to man sized silhouettes.

Extrapolating this further with wind we can utilize another method of ensuring quick and dirty hits using a red dot.

We don't need any wind correction from 0-200 yards. Remember our target is a human torso and a 10 MPH crosswind will only push you to the edge of the target, but a hit is a hit.

Driving the target out to 300 yards all wind correction can be applied by aiming at the face and then moving the dot over the shoulder of the silhouette regardless of 5 or 10 mph wind.

Pushing 400 yards, things become a little more imaginative, but still easy to grasp. At this distance we must not only shoot off the hat, but wind corrections require more difficult Kentucky windage methods.

For 5 MPH wind, aim at "the hat" and bring your dot over to the imaginary verticle line created by the edge of the torso.

At a 10MPH crosswind, the shot will need your imagination: imagine someone standing shoulder to shoulder with your intended target, and knock their hat off.

So in a practical sense, utilizing a few simple tricks and repeatable methods of using your "minds eye" can extend your effective range with a variety of 5.56 loadings and a red dot provided we aren't cutting the velocity back too far from SBR weapons.

To make this even better, many popular center fire loadings can utilize this method with a 50 yard zero and optics. To read more, visit the chest, the head, and the hat

THANKS

"Quick & dirty"  requires a considerable amount of hands on and rounds down range.

There are no short cuts!

The three holds are easily repeatable as they use the human body as a BDC reference. The amount of time to master wind calls and judging distance would be the harder aspect of this method.

I have used it in practice at 400 yard moving targets and was the only one on the line to consistently get hits without magnification.

Everything requires practice, but with some forethought to your setup, you can really develop proficiency quickly with these types of methods. YMMV.

Good info OP!!   Tag, and Thank You!!!

I have used a similar system in Action Rifle Matches and it works quite well.

Thank you for posting.

Tag! I'll definitely put this to use. Thanks     (:

thanks

400 yards is a chip shot unless it s really windy.

Anyone worth their salt should easily be able to hit a man size target. Hell you should ease my be able to hit a 12" plate at 400 yards.

This I can remember!
Gj keeping it simple for people like me  
Also, I live in Southeast KY, and I do believe I was born with an innate ability to read wind...

I agree with pretty much all of this and have become to find little practical use for bdc scopes... either it's close enuff for this method or long enough to need to dial.

I've come to similar conclusions, it works.  Wind reading is of course the hardest part.  20+mph gusts at 400 gets tricky for first round hit probability

 400 yards on a 12" plate with a non-magnified optic a chip shot?  I'm not THAT old, and my vision is corrected to 20/20, and I can't hardly SEE a 12" plate at 400 yards, let alone shoot at it.