The trainers at Suarez International are known for their progressive force-on-force training and advocating point shooting for many lethal encounters. Yet, even they acknowledge that learning solid fundamentals on more distant targets makes you more effective up close and generally more skillful.

 

The Long Shot…and why you should work on being able to take it was published in response to a shooting at the Carson City IHOP where a CCW citizen passed up a shot at longer range.  These tactical trainers acknowledge what competition shooters have been saying all along.

 

Learning how and practicing to make longer shots can help you as a way to practice fundamentals. Shooting long, whether with regular sights or a red dot, stresses the fundamental principles of good shooting as much, if not more, than standing five or ten yards away from a target and thinking “grip, stance, picture, alignment, breathe, press”. The need for solid basics is paramount. The slight twitch of a trigger or fractional-degree skew in sight alignment that puts you off an inch or two at ten yards is going to be a clean miss at fifty or a hundred. Consistent trigger work and the steadiest hold and/or position you can get before taking the shot appears to be the most important, but every fundamental has to be done well for the long shot. Training and practicing this kind of shooting is a way to push yourself into developing solid basic shooting principles that carry over to every shot you will ever have to make.

It will help with closer-range precision shooting.

We acknowledge the possibility that we might have to move from COM to a small-area or even pinpoint target. Besides specific practice for that possibility, working on the long shot is a way to help prepare for the close precise shot. The same fundamentals are as important; repetitions of anything that stresses those fundamentals is good; and your subconscious can be conditioned to not panic about any very small target you have to hit, whether it is a torso at 75 yards or somebody’s right eye at thirty feet.

The better you get at it, the more confidence you will have in your general ability and the more confidence you will have about almost any kind of shot you have to make.

Better to have it and not need it than…

It’s like a seatbelt and insurance, ladies and gentlemen. You put it on and set it up without ever expecting to need it. But understanding that there is just enough of a possibility that you might have to use it, you do it anyway. Just in case…

 

Read more here:

http://www.warriortalknews.com/2011/11/the-long-shot.html