JUDGING DISTANCE

With the revolver, which was not usually shot at longer range than fifty yards, judging distance was of little importance.

With a full charge .45 revolver, sighted for twenty yards, the drop of the bullet was not more than about 1½ inches at fifty yards.

With gallery ammunition in a .44 revolver the drop was about 4½ inches.

I am speaking from memory, not from actual calculations or measurements.

The duelling pistol, although shooting the same gallery charge, needs slightly less allowance at fifty yards, as there is none of the escape of gas the revolver has at the cylinder.

There was, therefore, no need to judge distance with a revolver but the automatic pistol with its heavy charge shoots as far as the old time rifles did and so needs knowledge of distance judging on occasions.

Owing to the shortness of the barrel it is very difficult to do accurate shooting at long range, but the pistol itself carries and shoots well up to rifle “midrange” (i. e., five hundred yards).As it is so difficult to shoot at long range with a pistol there is all the more necessity to be able to judge distance so as to avoid another cause of error.

A long range revolver match took place in 1911 in Colorado, but many important details are lacking.

It was gotten up by the Magazine Outdoor Life of Colorado.

The conditions were five sighting shots, and then twenty shots to count.

The target was a brown paper profile of a turkey at three hundred yards’ range.

This description is very vague, as all reports of shooting by non-experts are; they always leave out vital details and put in a lot of useless matter; it may mean a target of fifteen inches in diameter (if it only included the body of the turkey) or over thirty inches (if it included the whole of the turkey, head, legs, feathers, and tail).

Probably it was the latter size as, if it was only fifteen inches in diameter, that would correspond to an inch bull’s-eye at twenty yards, or a 2½-inch one at fifty yards, much too small for revolver shooting.

It is extremely difficult to hit a four-inch bull’s-eye for a succession of twenty shots at fifty yards. I have hit it ten times in twelve shots (see page 349), and the much greater difficulty of hitting a corresponding sized target at three hundred yards would make a full score impossible with a revolver.

The winner, name not given, made three hits for his twenty shots, six men hit it twice in their twenty shots, six hit it once, and six missed every shot.

This is not a very encouraging result of a long range revolver shoot.

Though the automatic pistol would be much more accurate at that distance, still I doubt if any one could get more than eight shots on the turkey in twenty shots at three hundred yards.

To be of any use for comparison the actual diameter of the turkey would have to be ascertained.

Judging distance should be constantly practised, under all conditions of light, by judging when out walking how far off a man is, and then walking up to the spot, counting your steps, to see if you have judged right.

Do not measure distance by yard strides and thus draw attention to your movements and raise doubt as to your sanity.

First measure in private, say one hundred yards, and then walk it with your natural length of step when walking at your usual speed, and see how many of your steps go to one hundred yards.

When you know your number of steps for a hundred yards you can measure distances in ordinary walking and without passers-by noticing what you are doing.

My natural walk is 104 steps to the 100 yards at four miles an hour.

Try, when you think you are fairly accurate, to judge the distance a man is off also judge how far a small boy is. You will find at first you think him much further off than he is owing to having got into the habit of judging the distance by the height of the man.

When you come back to judging how far off a man is you will underestimate the distance for the same reason.

Mist makes an object appear much further off than it really is; a sheep close by appears as large as a stag one hundred yards off.

Distance is very deceptive and if one is accustomed to judging the distance of an object of a certain size and then has to change to a similar looking object of a different size the difficulty is increased.

When I have been shooting at stags and judging their distance with fair accuracy and then change to roe deer shooting, the roe always seems much further off than the real distance, because a roe at one hundred yards looks the same size as a stag at two hundred yards off.

This difficulty is increased if the objects are mistaken for each other.

Suppose a river with steep banks, fifty yards broad, in a flat meadow, and you stand in clear atmosphere and full sunshine at a spot twenty yards from the nearest bank. From where you stand you cannot see the breadth of the river; the two banks looking like one line on the green of the meadow.A faded, weatherbeaten, red fire bucket, is standing on the edge of the far bank, and a flower pot on the near bank.

Both objects look identical in size, shape, and colour because of the linear and aËrial perspective at these distances, and it is impossible, unless they are studied very carefully with a telescope or field glass, to know which is which and therefore which is the further off. If you are accustomed to judging the distances of flower pots you would think the fire bucket was a flower pot and therefore only twenty yards off instead of seventy.

Be sure you know what the object is when using it as a means of judging distance, it may be something much larger or smaller of a similar appearance.

A pony, when seen through a thick haze, mistaken for a horse would entirely upset your calculations.

The use of being able to judge distances accurately is to enable you to decide how much to aim above a distant object to make up for the distance the bullet drops in going that distance.

The drop of the bullet increases rapidly as the distance increases.

Whilst at short range the drop is so slight that it does not signify except for extremely accurate shooting, the bullet does not drop in similar proportion at further range.

At two hundred it may not drop more than double what it does at one hundred, but the proportion of drop between two hundred and three hundred is still greater and so on; the flight of the bullet describing, not a section of the circumference of a circle, but a parabolic curve.

When shooting at a man standing upright this drop can be ignored up to four hundred yards with the Military Automatic pistol; as long as the aim is taken at the top of the chest it will hit him somewhere.

But if only a man’s head shows it may be missed over or under according as the distance is misjudged, too far or too short.

If a puff of dust or a splash of water can be seen where the first bullet strikes it will serve to correct the aim for the next shot.