Having a rifle is cool and all but at some point you’re going to want to shoot it. What’s more, you’re going to want to shoot it a long distance. Most importantly, you’re going to want to hit what you’re aiming at. It’s kind of the point, really. Sadly, just slapping a scope on to your rifle isn’t going to suffice. At the moment, I’m not aware of any self adjusting rifle scopes. Before you can go shooting, you need to tell your scope where the bullet path is going to be. This is called “zeroing the rifle”.

Before we go any further, you might notice that I mention the 100 yards distance a lot. This is pretty much the standard sighting distance for all scopes. Even if you’re eventually going to reach out and touch 1000 yards, you’re still going to zero at 100. Why? Because MOA is calculated based off the 100 yard distance.

As far as zeroing goes, there’s two or three ways to accomplish this task. First and foremost, you can just go to the range, but the rifle into a bench rest (this is important) then aim at some paper about 100 yards away. Shoot three rounds then see where they hit. Then you just adjust the scope’s reticle to the center of where the shots hit…provided they hit paper. If not, you’re going to need to estimate, adjust the scope and try again. This method often takes a lot of back and forth but it gets the job done with nothing more than your ammo and a rifle stand. The three round shot is important to get the average spread of your rifle. If you go one shot at a time per adjustment, you’re going to be forever chasing that zero. Also, this method kind of goes to crap if it’s windy or hot out. Those things will affect your rifle in significant ways.

If you don’t mind spending a bit for some extra tools, get yourself an optical boresighter. This is a device that fits into the barrel of your gun and produces an image of a grid into your rifle’s sight. All you have to do at this point is adjust the reticle so that it lines up with the center grid lines and your rifle is now zeroed for 100 yards. These cost around $30-$50 depending on where you get them but, if you swap your scopes or just shoot often, having this to be able to return you to a baseline at any given moment is worth it. It takes less than a minute to get your scope ready to go.

Finally, the inbetween of these two methods is a laser boresighter. These are mostly for use with pistols but in a pinch they can help you find that zero on your scope. Keep in mind, I’ve seen numerous laser boresighters that claim they can be used with rifles but I’ve tested quite a few and I’ve yet to find one that’s really useable beyond 25 yards. This is partially because the cheap little lasers they use in the boresighters spread quite a lot over short distances. Not only that, but in any kind of sunlight they’re almost impossible to see. The green ones, while a bit more expensive, are better when zeroing at outdoor ranges. With that in mind, the way I use a laser boresighter for a rifle is to zero it at the 25 yard range. This will pretty much ensure that you’ll hit the paper at the 100 yard range when you start using the first method.

Now that your rifle is zeroed, you have a good starting point for any scope adjustments for bullet drop and windage. Get out there and practice!

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Breathing is important. That’s all. End of article. Thanks for stopping by everyone! Yeah, I wasn’t expecting you to buy that one. The end of the article thing, that is, not the breathing thing. I’m not joking on that point. Breathing is what separates the dead from the living, the animate from the inanimate.

Breathing correctly, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing and I honestly have no idea why I started the article out like that. Tell you what, ignore that first paragraph. Keep breathing, of course, because you should do that and I would never suggest otherwise.

Let’s try this again. When shooting rifles, once you start going out past 100 yards everything seems to change. Little things become big things and any flaw is going to be amplified significantly. It’s that whole “a small percentage of a big number is still a big number” thing we’ve discussed in one way or another.

The further out you go, the more you’re going to have to refine your technique. When you start pushing 1000 yards, even something like your heartbeat can throw the shot completely off target. This is why you should be working on your technique even at short distances so that you don’t have to unlearn bad habits as you move further out. If the opening rambling was any indicator, one of those techniques we’re talking about today is how to properly breathe.

Manual breathing mode engaged.

Good, now that you’re paying attention to your breathing, let’s look at what happens. Your chest expands and your shoulders rise. If you are hunched over, your back will straighten a bit and if you’re prone your body will rise up off the ground. It may not be much distance but it’s enough to throw your shot off significantly, even at shorter distances.

So just hold your breath, right? Not so much. Kind of. In a way yes but not really. Holding your breath is ultimately what you do but it’s how you hold your breath that’s important. If you gulp in air like you would before diving underwater, it’s going to cause other problems. For starters, your heart is going to speed up a bit to start pushing all that new oxygen through your system. Your muscles are also going to tense up because of the expansion of your chest as well as the effort it takes to keep all that air inside. What we need to do is find a way to hold your breath that will actually relax your body.

Continue the manual breathing mode.

Try this, breathe in as normal then slowly let the air out. Do this a couple of times to gauge where the halfway point is on the exhale. Now, breathe in and exhale then pause for a moment at that halfway point. This is the ideal spot to pull the trigger of a rifle or even a pistol if you’re shooting for accuracy. At this halfway point, the body is relaxing, the heart is slowing down and it takes almost no effort to hold the remaining air in. Then it’s just a matter of accounting for heartbeat but that’s another article.

So try that out next time you’re at the range. In the meantime, go ahead and engage manual blinking mode for no other reason than because I’m being a jerk now.

“Lungs diagram simple” by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator – Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lungs_diagram_simple.svg#mediaviewer/File:Lungs_diagram_simple.svg

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The phrase “I was just cleaning it and it went off” has become almost as cliche as “hey, ya’ll, watch this”. Still, it seems there are a strangely large number of “accidents” that occur while cleaning a gun. The explanation is always “it just went off”. Like the gun was just sitting on the table and BLAM!….there’s now a hole in the television. Call me skeptical but does this actually happen? Well, we’re going to take a look in today’s episode of Noobvember Gun Mythbust….sorry…hold on a sec…I’m getting a text from my lawyer….

Ok, so I can’t use the term “Mythb[REDACTED]er” because of copyright laws and such. So…uh..We’re going to take a look in today’s episode of Noobvember Gun Myth….uhm..smashers!

Every single instruction manual for guns starts its field stripping section with some variation of the phrase “ensure gun is unloaded”. I can think of about a dozen pistol right off the top of my head that require you pull the trigger in order to take the gun apart. How many “it just went off’s” do you think came from just that action alone?

If you look at every “cleaning and gun went off story”, they can be debunked with a single question: Why were they cleaning a loaded gun? I would be willing to bet that, if you were to get them in a private, off the record conversation, the majority of them would admit that they weren’t actually cleaning the gun at the time. More than likely they were playing with it and didn’t follow the basic safety rules for whatever reason. Barring that, there are only two ways a gun could go off during the cleaning process:

1. the aforementioned “didn’t check for empty” before they started
2. mechanical failure of the gun when all was said and done and they were reloading it.

You have to keep in mind that for #2, the probability of that happening is incredibly minuscule. In my previous discussion on ammunition failures I’ve shown that a small percentage of a large number can still be large number. Taking into account the number of guns out there (270+ million) and the list of things that would have to fail in order for the average gun to fire when chambering a round, the probability is almost incalculably small. I spoke with a local gunsmith and asked him this exact question: “how many guns have you come across that were being repaired because they fired while chambering a round?” His answer? One. In 35 years it was one gun. That gun was an open bolt, antique, class III weapon (a STEN, specifically). Keep in mind, open bolt designs are particularly funky. Guns sold to the average Joe, however, fire from a closed bolt. The differences are important but the details of why will have to wait for another article. Suffice to say, most open bolt guns are machine guns and sub-machine guns and they’re notorious for going off when chambering a round. For your normal, everyday weapon it is just unfathomably rare. Not impossible, mind you, but rare enough where it simply cannot account for even a significant number of the accidents that happen while cleaning. The more likely scenario was the person had their finger on the trigger while chambering the round.

What about dropped guns? This is yet another case where Hollywood hasn’t done much to help here. In looking at your average movie, you’d think a gun would go off if you set it on the table hard enough. At some point in history, this may have been a bit more common. Modern guns, however, are built and designed in ways that prevent them from firing when dropped. Even the simple revolver has disconnects that will prevent a strike to the hammer from causing it to fire. Glocks are a great example of drop safety designs as well. They have a safety on the trigger to make sure it doesn’t move unless a finger is on it and they have a big chunk of steel that keeps the firing pin from coming anywhere near the primer of a round. I’ve seen demonstrations ever where someone as chambered a round into a Glock then used the gun as a hammer to drive a bunch of nails through wood. That is FAR more force than you will ever put on the gun when dropping it.

The final scenario is when someone is carrying concealed and the gun “goes off” when getting out of a car or what have you. There was a story recently where someone was carrying at a wedding and his gun fired when someone hugged him. Once again, these aren’t “just went off” situations. I’ve spent a great deal of time looking into it and in every article and report I’ve read, it came down to either cheap/improper holsters or they were fiddling with their guns or both.

A poor holster can snag the trigger or not even cover the trigger at all. Lack of retention can also come into play causing other issues as well. New carriers also have this inexplicable tendency to play with their guns a lot. I’m not talking taking it out and spinning it around on their finger like some old western movie. More like constantly adjusting it or checking that it’s still there, those kinds of things. Combine that tendency with a bad holster and you’ve got a negligent discharge waiting to happen.

The fact of the matter is, guns don’t just go off. Pretty much every negligent discharge is purely down to user error. I say this not to throw people under the bus, mind you. Understanding our own role in making sure a gun only goes bang when we want is important. By continuing this “it just went off” line, it shifts the line of thinking away from “how can I make sure this doesn’t fire in the first place”. Understanding that if a gun fires, whether intentional or unintentional, it is because of your doing will make you safer in the long run.

In the meantime, the myth that guns just go off? That myth is bus[REDACTED].

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There is a near unfathomable amount of ammo manufactured on a daily basis. I don’t even want to estimate the number but I’m sure it’s pretty big. Ok, I’ll estimate it. Right now, the manufacturers are in full production and they average about 12 billion rounds per year which comes out to just short of 33 million rounds a day.

Now, quality assurance at the manufacturers is impressive. The problem is, it’s not foolproof. I’ve been researching for a while but I haven’t found any solid estimates on how many bad rounds get out. Admittedly, if I was a manufacturer, I sure as heck would keep that number close to my chest. Knowing what I know of other manufacturer’s, I’m going to give an estimate of .001% of those rounds make it past quality assurance (keep in mind, that is purely an estimate pulled off the top of my head). That means that, on any given day, 329 bad rounds could make it out into the market.

Sometimes, those rounds are easy to spot. I’ve seen some where the bullet was seated way too far into the casing and I’ve seen bullets seated the wrong way. Other times it’s a faulty primer or, in really bad cases, inadequate amounts of powder.

The less than ideal amount of powder is where problems happen. If there isn’t enough powder, the bullet won’t make it out of the barrel. Interestingly enough, if there is absolutely zero powder in the cartridge, the primer has enough power to get the bullet about 25%-50% of the way into the barrel where it will get stuck. There is a term for this kind of situation: “squib”. Technically it’s called an obstruction but pretty much everyone calls it a squib. I should note that a squib is far more likely to happen with hand reloads than in the mass produced stock. They are possible, however, in either so constant diligence is necessary.
A squib, in and of itself, isn’t a big deal as they are easy to repair so it’s not the end of the world. All you have to do is take the barrel out then hammer the bullet out the rest of the way using a wood dowel. Make sure you hammer it out in the direction it would normally go (breech to bore) because pushing it out the way it came could damage the barrel.

The danger of a squib comes in when a shooter doesn’t realize they’ve got a squib. In most cases, they’re shooting and shooting. Then they get a super weak round. “That’s odd”, they think as they manually cycle the spent brass. They aim, pull the trigger again and BOOM!!!!1!1!! Notice it said “BOOM!!!!1!1!!” and not “Bang!”. The gun flies into many pieces. The shooter’s hands and face are cut up. The gun is no longer usable unless you want to throw shards of metal at something.

What happened is the first bullet got lodged in the barrel as discussed earlier. Then the second round started to push its way in. Not just the bullet, mind you, but all the gasses as well. Now, if you’ve ever over-inflated a balloon, you know what happens. All those gasses are going into the barrel. They’ve got to go somewhere. They can’t push the bullet out…which is where the gasses normally escape. With nowhere else to go, the barrel pops like a balloon. I’ve tried and tried to find high speed footage of a catastrophic failure but I would bet that it would look very similar to a balloon popping at first. It would inflate past its engineered tolerances and as it blows it takes the other gun parts with it.

So how does one prevent this? Simple: pay attention. If you’ve shot for more than 3 or 4 rounds, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what a particular caliber feels like in the gun you’re shooting. It’s going to have a pretty recognizable profile every time you pull the trigger. If you get a shot that’s noticeably weaker, stop shooting immediately. Render the gun safe then field strip it. Look into the barrel. Do you see light? Good news! The bullet cleared the barrel. Just make sure there isn’t any residue and go back to what you were doing. If there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, well, unless you have the tools with you at the range you’re probably done shooting that gun for the day. Keep in mind, a lot of ranges have the tools necessary to clear that out so ask a Range Safety Officer for help.

Other things that can cause squibs: shooting un-jacketed bullets through barrels that aren’t meant to have them. Glocks are the biggest culprit in that case. Your gun’s manual will tell you if it’s ok to use that kind of ammo. Dirt and debris as well as pocket lint can also obstruct the barrel so regular cleaning is a must.

Just make sure you’re paying attention to more than just your target while you’re shooting and you’ll be ok. If something doesn’t feel right, stop and figure out why. Shrugging things off is how people get injured.

Image screenshotted from YouTube Video: http://youtu.be/fLk5ykGPDsU

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