THE WRONG WAY TO LEARN

Pistol practice varies in different countries.

As duelling is still general on the Continent, practice with the pistol is conducted differently to that customary in the United States or England.

On the Continent most men of the upper classes have at least a rudimentary acquaintance with the foil and duelling pistol, but in the English-speaking nations a man has rarely ever handled or even seen a duelling pistol, or the few who have done pistol shooting have never shot except at a stationary bull’s-eye target.

At the English National Rifle Association at Bisley, the attempt was made to induce men to practise at moving, rapid-firing, and disappearing targets, as well as advancing and retiring ones, but these had reluctantly one by one to be given up, owing to there being so few men who cared to shoot in such competitions.

In the days when I used to compete regularly at Bisley, I do not think there were more than half a dozen of us who competed at the sliding target, and even fewer at the rapid-firing one.We, in those days, used revolvers and black powder, which made such shooting very difficult owing to the smoke obscuring the target.

I give at the end of this book the best targets, full size, made in these competitions which will now remain permanently the best on record, as the revolver and ammunition are no longer made. They will rank with the “High Wheel” trotting records as “Hors Concours.”

Any one who wishes to compete in revolver-shooting competitions in England must modify my teaching in the preceding chapters, and refer to my Art of Revolver Shooting for details of competition.

The duelling pistol is not used in England, but there are many revolvers still in use there; England is the last country to use the revolver in the army, and is the last refuge of the revolver, just as Yellowstone Park is the last refuge of the buffalo.

For competition in England, practising will have to be done with a revolver, not an automatic pistol, and a deliberate aim taken at a black bull’s-eye on a white target.

In the United States, the automatic pistol is the sole weapon now. Several Challenge Trophies, which I modelled and presented to various associations, have had to have their conditions altered to “automatic pistols” from “revolvers,” and as the automatic inevitably tends to rapid shooting, the days of stationary target shooting are numbered.Many people defend shooting at a stationary target, on the plea that one must learn one’s alphabet before learning to read.

This is correct as far as it goes, but they carefully omit to add that after a boy has learned his alphabet, he goes on to reading, and writing. He does not merely repeat his alphabet all his life.

Just the same argument is used by those who say that blundering through Greek and Latin, with the help of a dictionary, teaches modern languages; that these latter are “so easy after a grounding in Latin and Greek.”

If it is so easy why do they not learn modern languages. They cannot speak a word of any language but their own, and even the few sentences of Latin and Greek they can parrot-like repeat, no foreigner can understand, as they pronounce them with the English vowel sounds. For the same reason they mispronounce all foreign names.

A Russian who cannot speak French and German as well as his own language is considered entirely uneducated.

A man may be a crack shot at a stationary target and yet be absolutely useless with his pistol in case of having to use it in a hurry at anything in motion.

If you want to learn something, learn it, do not learn another thing, so as to be prepared to learn something else later on, if you care to.

If you want to eat a peach do not first drink ten plates of soup, and eat a leg of mutton, or you may not have the time or desire to eat the peach.

If you want to learn practical pistol shooting, learn it, do not waste time learning unpractical shooting.

You not only waste your time, but you spoil your “timing,” which is the great thing in pistol shooting, and also your sense of direction. You get into the habit of putting up your pistol and then searching for the bull’s-eye, instead of having it all come by instinct, like putting your spoon into your mouth.

I can tell a man who is not a practical shot, by the way he first finds his sights, and then hunts round for the target with them. If it were a live target, it would have made itself scarce while he was searching for his sights.