Coach Risley on Pistol Shooting and Focus

[HMFIC]

I found this old handout from Marion Risley who was the Oklahoma Pistol Team Coach for many years.

Hope y'all enjoy and can use the information.

Cut out around this model sight. Point it toward your holding area on the target. It's the moment of truth. Prove to your mind that the human eye can't see the sight and the target at the same time. When you focus half way down range, you can see both target and sight fairly well. Of course you'll never change your NRA classification that way nor can you see the small errors in your sights. Small errors mean that you can't distinguish the difference on your sights between an X and a 8. Now focus on the target and you'll find some more differences. Now you can't tell if your sight is lined up for an X or a 6. You'll notice also that your pistol seems muzzle heavy and even trigger heavy.

Next step, when you focus very hard on the front sight you must concentrate to the best of your ability. Concentration means that you can no longer hear all the noise around you. You are not aware of other shooters moving, birds flying or wind blowing. To totally concentrate, you have to consider time, not by looking at a watch but mentally you're aware of the passage of time. The best you can hope for when we consider total concentration is about 2 to 5 seconds. Don't worry if you never make it for 5 seconds, few people in this world can. During this period of total concentration some people have even experienced a gray halo effect around the sights and top of the slide. With practice, you can focus on the front sight, concentrate on the sight and when concentration is at it's peak your trigger finger will add that last little amount of pressure to make the pistol fire. If you're concentrating you'll have a surprise shot. A surprise shot can be described as you thinking that your sights looked terrible when the pistol is fired. The pistol seemed to recoil slowly and you see the brass eject and float slowly away before you blinked your eyes. Why did the sights look so bad when the shot broke? It's because with a surprise shot, the last thing you seen was actually the first part of the pistol starting to recoil.

We've covered what the eye and mind must handle to shoot well so how about the trigger finger? To physically deliver one good shot a number of movements must occur in their proper sequence.

1. Find a grip that you are comfortable with and use that same grip with that pistol for every shot that is fired. The lower three fingers should be (uniformly) pressing the back of the grip into the crease of the palm of the hand that has been formed by the thumb. The thumb has nothing to do with the grip so let it stick up or hang out or down.

2. The trigger finger, if it's long enough, should just touch the right side of the trigger at the crease in the first joint of the finger. Now bend that first joint over the trigger. It doesn't matter if the finger crosses the trigger at an angle or straight across. Now to kill another old wives tale; it doesn't matter if the trigger finger touches or doesn't touch the side of the pistol frame or stock. What does matter is that you do touch the trigger the same way and place for every shot. Left handers you know to reverse the information listed above.

3. Raise the pistol and shooting arm smoothly and slowly to just above your holding area on the target. Don't get hung up about where your holding area is, put the damn pistol anywhere inside of your target frame. Now let the pistol settle to your holding area and at the same time start pressure on the trigger. Keep adding pressure from this point on. Focus hard on the front sight. (Keep adding that pressure) Block out all other thoughts except the sights. When you see your sights move slightly followed by the fire at the muzzle, sights and pistol jumping up and a brass casing floating to your right you've had your first surprise shot.

4. At this point (if you're in slow fire) analyze the shot. You should be able to tell many things about that shot. Your thoughts, concentration, focus, sights misaligned, held too long and follow through. When I say misaligned I am talking about the front sight and the rear sight NOT about that black spot down range.

If you do all of the above with the other basics of shooting, you will shoot 2600. This was the big secret to success, I wasn't going to tell you but you forced it out of me.

One more thing, if you buy a VW bus don't ask A.J. Foyt for driving tips. First learn to shift gears before filling your head with super-master tips. If you can't learn what's on this page then you can't shift gears yet. "Nuff said"

- Coach Risley
May 1, 1991