Lucky Charms and Twister

Yesterday, GF and a good friend of ours spent a better portion of the day at the range shooting the shit out of some paper.

You know after a few months of shooting paper plates and splatter targets it just sucks. Most ranges (including mine) do not allow any sort of shooting exercises to be performed, or movement drills. They just want you to shoot straight at your target, play nice with others and go home without a ambulance ride. I totally understand, they have liability.

But yesterday, the weather was pretty chilly it had rained the night before and we had the outside 50 m range to ourselves.

Back in August I wrote a short post about Haley Strategic Partners. They offer free paper targets that you can print yourself and take to the range. I do suggests you have a partner if you shoot these targets, its more fun! Here are a couple of examples.

The premiss is to have your back turned to the Lucky Charms target. There are three possibles for each target. Your partner calls out a color, number, or shape. You turn, draw and shoot. The idea is to make you think first. Identify your target, sight, squeeze, and fire.

The Twister Drill is kind of the same as the Lucky Charms but you can really mix it up.

We ran the Twister like this: Starting with your back towards the target

Drill 1:  Shoot all the red dots on each line. Turn facing target, draw and shoot all the red dots.

Drill 2: Shoot the last two dots on the second line. Turn facing target, draw and shoot.

Drill 3: Shoot the first two dots on line one and the first two on the last line. Turn facing target, draw and shoot.

Your shooting partner can really use his/her imagination when calling out shots. You can also add the extra stress of only putting a few rounds in each magazine and as the shooter goes through the exercise he/she is forced to do a magazine reload in the middle of the exercise. Throw a snap cap in a magazine, force a failure to fire.

We burned though the last hour (or maybe two) shooting these targets, had fun. Because our paper was 8.5 x 11′ we kept all our shots at 3 m.

Here is a link to get your own copy of the targets in PDF format from Haley Strategic Partners that you can get through Soldiersystems.net, scroll down the page and you can see the link to Haley Strategic.

As a post script. The first part of November I wrote a post about a gun failure that occurred to me. I shot probably 200 rounds through that same weapon yesterday and never had an issue. I now check every piece of ammunition before I throw it in my ammo box.