It is day one and a new group of shooters are ready to take the line. Their backgrounds make for impressive resume items and range from battles in big city dark alleys to foreign countries.

Armed with full tacticool regalia, pistol at Sul and a menacing scowl they take the line. First drill: Slow fire groups with dummy rounds mixed in the magazine. On Bullseye targets.

How boringly basic and dull. Such activity is beneath the modern Musashi. And on the same target those competition “one way range” shooters use. How un-tacticool.

How … revealing.

Its so simple. Take all the time you want and hit a black polka dot. Move the trigger without moving anything else. A “click” on a dummy round should do nothing. Big talk of prowess against barn-door-sized qualification targets wane in light of cylinder-bore patterns and frequent dive bombing on dummy round clicks.

This isn’t addressed towards an individual because I’ve seen this scenario play out on every military, police and hunter sight-in range I’ve ever been on. A flinch is a natural subconscious reaction to the inherent fear of load noises. Basically, a flinch indicates that the shooter is still afraid of his weapon and has not yet trained sufficiently to reprogram correct reflexes.

Don’t get mad at me, I’m just reporting the way it is.