The best marksmanship books are typically written by high level competition shooters because it is rare to find high level marksmen without competition experience. Problem is these books tend to focus on the specific shooting discipline and are primarily read by other competitors in that discipline.

General gun owners, hunters, military and law enforcement need to be exposed to higher level shooting in order to understand it. Successful Shooting is a rare gem that is written by someone involved in top notch shooting competition but addresses shooting to the gun owning masses.

Lieutenant Colonel William C. Pullum was a coach of the US Army Marksmanship Unit Service Rifle and International Rifle teams. He also had personal, high level shooting experience having competed as a service rifle shooter and earning the Distinguished Rifleman Badge. His major contribution was coaching highly successful Olympic Rifle Teams during the height of the US programs, back when United States shooting community actually cared enough to support Olympic shooters. Lones Wigger, Lanny Bassham, and John Writer were a few of the Olympians on Pullum’s team.

Successful Shooting takes Pullum’s lessons learned from International Rifle competition and puts them in the context of shooting for everyone owning a firearm. The first chapter, Recoil and Related Esoterica, is worth the price of the book alone. Quite frankly, if you don’t understand the ideas discussed therein (and most gun owners don’t) you simply do not understand how to zero a firearm and your shooting will forever suffer for it.

Book Of The Rifle

Jim Carmichel, best known for being the Shooting Editor at Outdoor Life, was also a top notch competition shooter in High Power, Long Range and Benchrest disciplines. Now retired, he was one of the few truly authoritative gun writers that combined proven, winning shooting skill with a well studied history combined with an approachable writing style.

The Book of the Rifle is his masterwork and remains possibly the best single text on the subject. It is an incredibly complete look at the rifle, its history, development and application. Though primarily focused on the hunter and sportsman, it covers some aspects of military application and competition.

The history of competition shooting is incredibly important to both firearms and marksmanship development and I wish Carmichel spent some more time on it, but I suspect this made his book more approachable to typical hunters and other gun owners.

The section on marksmanship was shorter than I would have liked, especially considering Carmichel had the chops to elucidate further, but his approach was both novel and useful.

If you ever wondered how rifle work, I mean how they REALLY work, and why, this is the book to get.

“While the other officers struggle to knock down targets at the gun range, Steven shows why he is considered a master shooter. “

Steven Seagal, a “master” shooter?

We have decades of formal practical shooting competition and a well over a century of conventional shooting and this is the best that A&E can find?

Wow. F-ing wow.

I guess they haven’t learned how to use “The Google” yet……..

Legions of gun owners, especially hunters, would greatly improve their shooting and hunting experience by abandoning all use of the bench and all efforts at load development. As the quoted article points out, the “holy grail” of field rifle accuracy (1 MOA) can now routinely be had over the counter and off the shelf. The battle has been won. Equipment is now good enough that it is no longer a factor, yet, hunters persist to  shoot exclusively off the bench. They have finely tuned rifles and completely lack the ability to use that precision in the hunting environment they claim to be preparing for.

“Formal Benchrest shooter” doesn’t have to be a registered IBS or NBRSA competitor. I know shooters that aren’t formal BenchRest competitors that enjoy precision shooting and load development, using purpose-built rifle built exclusively for bench shooting.  Varminters that take portable bench-like supports to prairie dog towns fit this category, too.

Raw precision is their goal and end game, with no intention of ever shooting that equipment in the field from position. There is no delusion that this work at the loading or shooting bench magically translates to more dead deer.