I was out at the range today rezeroing all the members of the AR family from my safe when I discovered something pretty cool. My shooting accuracy was up, WAY UP!
When I first started shooting rifles a few years ago (I had been pretty much a pistol guy for a long time) I was quickly seduced by high speed/low drag items, especially cool scopes like the Aimpoint, ACOG and all the other goodies. All my ARs were flattops with a variety of optics and although I have an M1A Scout Rifle its' irons have always been a bit screwy so I count on an Aimpoint there, too. In short I zeroed in my scopes and shot from there. Fine.
Or was it? When I started shooting my precision AR (a Fulton Predator) this year I noticed that my groups often started out okay but quickly became spread and inconsistant. It soon became obvious it wasn't the rifle. It was me. I hadn't really spent time with the basics of marksmanship as much as I should of. If I wasn't shooting well I marked it up to a "bad day" or "the wrong ammo for this barrel" or something like that. Then I went in search of expensive solutions...
It wasn't until I had the most serious setup that I saw what was really going on. I spent more time chasing the reticle than working on breathing, or how to focus or a smooth trigger break. As a wise friend of mine put it, "Once you have the best equipment the only thing left to screw up is you!" Amen.
So I went out and picked up a CZ-452 Special for $195 at Gander Mountain along with four bricks of Federal hi-vel hollowpoints.
I spent early July to late September shooting nothing but this fine rifle. It has an excellent set of iron sights which I experimented long and hard with, finally setting its' index zero at 50 yds. Starting with paper targets but moving on to spinners, wood shims and, my favorite, golf balls along with going out on the occasional squirrel hunt I spent nearly two thousand rounds on mastering just this one rifle. Now, using iron sights and Wally World bulk pack ammo, I can shoot quarter sized groups all day long at 50 yds.
So today when I broke out the ARs again and set about sighting in their backup irons and optics imagine the suprise I got when I saw how improved my shooting was with
these rifles. I've learned a valuable lesson here and had a lot of fun doing it. If you can shoot irons well, you can shoot
anything well!