PRELIMINARY INFORMATION

In revolver shooting there was the danger of making a bad shot through a badly fitted or dirty cylinder not turning quite into place, and causing a shaving of lead to be taken off the bullet as it passed into the barrel.

I was once trying a new pattern revolver, and made a very bad shot, although I knew I had let-off well. I opened the revolver, and a thin shred of lead fell out, showing the bullet had been deformed as it entered the barrel.

A bad shot from such a cause cannot happen to an automatic or a single-shot pistol.

A near-sighted man is at more disadvantage in pistol shooting than in rifle shooting.

With a rifle the hind sight can be fixed to the barrel nearer, or further from the eye until it is at just the right distance to suit the shooter.

The pistol must be held at the full stretch of the arm, or else one will get a blow on the nose, and will not be able to hold steadily.

A long-sighted man can continue pistol shooting without having to wear glasses long after he has to use them for reading.A near-sighted man finds the hind sight too far for him to see it clearly, and then makes the fatal mistake of shooting with a bent arm.

This not only prevents accurate shooting, but he is very apt to get the hind sight into his eye from the recoil of a kicking automatic.

The arm should be held straight and extended to full stretch, so as to point the pistol by sense of direction, just as a well-fitting shotgun stock enables the shooter to aim without consciously paying any attention to the sights.

Use the pistol exactly as you would use a shotgun. It is this want of knowledge of shotgun shooting which makes men shoot a pistol as if it were a rifle being used at a stationary target.

These men only understand lying down with a rifle, and poking about with the sights to find the target after they have put the rifle to their shoulder. Some have a lot of incantations first; they aim at the sky, bring the rifle down slowly, and then make a bull’s-eye on the wrong target as they naturally cannot know which is theirs of a string of targets, if they only fish about looking through a pin hole for it; they know nothing of the possibilities of a rifle or pistol, unless they are shotgun shooters as well.

The public consider “I did not know it was loaded” as ample and full excuse when one man shoots another in a so-called “accident.”

Not to know if the firearm you are handling is loaded is an unpardonable crime. It is so simple to open the firearm and see for yourself. I never take the owner’s word for it if he tells me a firearm is not loaded. Before I handle it, I examine it for myself.

The public think that no one but an expert can possibly know if a firearm is loaded; that the only way to know is to pull the trigger, and if any one happens to be shot, well, that is unavoidable and nobody is to blame.

It is to try to partly remedy this danger (it is impossible to make any firearm or instruction in its use “fool-proof”) that I ask any one who takes up this book to read the two following chapters, even if they take no interest in shooting. It may save a life.

Everything we do is a compromise, and nothing human can be made perfect in all particulars.

I give my ideas of what is wanting in automatics, not from a mechanic’s point of view, but from that of the one who has to shoot them.

Few mechanics are shooting experts. They make beautiful pistols from a mechanical point of view, but which are clumsy and unpractical from the shooter’s point of view.

Early inventors of automatics were not practical shots.

The inventor of one of the earliest automatics came to me with his invention. It was utterly impossible to handle or make any good shooting with it. It was like trying to eat soup with a fork. He kept telling me that if I “held it like this” and “did this,” I should be able to shoot with it, but it was as if he had told me if I sat with my face to the tail of the horse and held on by his hocks, I should be able to ride better than the usual way. Besides being of a most unwieldy shape, to grasp which you had to spread your fingers in all directions, this pioneer of the automatic pistol had all sorts of levers which must be moved by your different fingers in order to shoot it, as if you were playing the cornet.

Inventors, instead of evolving a pistol from their imagination, should consult an expert pistol shot, as to what improvements on existing pistols are required.

We are told by writers who use the fashionable word “imagination,” that to do anything, from governing a Nation to destroying submarines, “All that is needed is a man with ‘Imagination.’”

“Imagination” may do many things in legend or story but it will not teach a man pistol shooting, or enable him to invent an automatic pistol. I put experience and technical knowledge before “imagination” and theories.

In rifles there is the same sort of difficulty. It took me years before I found a gunmaker who would try to make a rifle on the lines I consider desirable for big-game shooting.

Big game is shot at short range, so flat trajectory is of no importance. What is important is to have a rifle which is light and well balanced and yet will knock down an animal with a terrific blow at close range. One does not want the sort of rifle so largely advertised as an ideal rifle for big-game shooting—a rifle which weighs as much as an arm-chair, balances like a poker, kicks like a horse, and is warranted to shoot into a two-inch bull’s-eye at four hundred yards, but is impossible to align on a rapidly moving animal at a few yards off, owing to its clumsiness and weight.

Inventors of firearms expect their customers to adapt themselves to their weapons instead of making the weapon to fit their customers, and answer to their requirements.

I stopped a man just in time, taking a Lea-Metford to shoot rooks with!

I was lecturing on the cruelty and uselessness of docking horses, amputating the bones and nerves of the horse’s tail and searing it with a hot iron, and what for? A man in the audience stood up and said: “If I did not dock my horse he would be too long to fit between the shafts of my cart.”

This is just the inventor’s attitude:

You must shorten your trigger finger by cutting off the first joint. I cannot alter all the blue prints of my invention just because you find the trigger too far back for your finger. Your finger is too long; my invention is perfect.

As a shooting man, not a gunmaker, I may suggest improvements impracticable to make with present means, but it was not by saying machines heavier than the air cannot be made to rise that the aeroplane was evolved.

It will be found that I have modified and even entirely changed some of my ideas since I published the Art of Revolver Shooting in 1890.

This is of course inevitable: one lives and learns, and I have learned much on the subject since then. Mechanical improvements have altered and eliminated difficulties which I had to teach how to avoid twenty-eight years ago.

On the other hand, new difficulties have arisen which have to be combated.

Those who cribbed from my former writings made a great mistake, and instruction which was quite right for revolvers is wrong for automatics. The position of the thumb, for instance, or the filing of the sights (which, almost without exception, these compilers of books have taken without acknowledgment from my Art of Revolver Shooting), are not applicable to modern pistols.

The best way to learn pistol shooting is to have an expert stand beside you, but, lacking this, the only way is to read a book by an expert.

It is very easy to write and to pose as an expert by the use of scissors, but it is rather hard on those who wish to learn, and also on those whose ideas are taken and used without acknowledgment.

I do not think any expert could write a book on pistol shooting using quotations, as each man has his own system.