Hey Paul, great articles lately! Especially the one i linked off on the sub-moa rifles right out of the box for under a grand
Now, we’re talking! Not being a particularly big bolt action hugger, i do have a Savage hiding somewhere in a dark corner that i couldn’t remember why i had it and now i recall. I think i picked it up for a couple hundred bucks and it shot in an inch so i kept it.

I’m glad to see highly skilled professionals taking the time to give us unwashed a top level lesson on proper shooting. It’s difficult to do a comprehensive ‘lesson’ in such a short essay. But you accomplished the mission. Entire books are just written just on proper Scopes and sniping usage. But you guys did a great focus on the primary functional issues.

I’m glad Ben didn’t use the word ‘Squeeze’ when referring to ‘pressing’ the trigger. The natural NLP of the word ‘squeeze’ tends to imply an entire grip pressure so many involuntarily squeeze their entire fist while ‘squeezing’ the trigger. When they were constantly told to ‘squeeze’ the trigger. They really meant gently pulling back with the finger tip, or better yet, taking the trigger finger ONLY and pressing the trigger back until it breaks.

I did my official formal ‘sniper training’ in the early days of sniper deployment in Nam. It was only a 3 week in-country training course that only guys who scored ‘expert’ in basic were encouraged to attend from certain units. The main emphasis was not on breathing or even trigger control, It was assumed that your rudimentary marksmanship, especially after some time shooting in combat where you must have ‘shot’ well enough to survive was good enough, so the emphasis was on using the scope and understanding milraden/mildot for ranging and doping. And then the rest of it was target engagement and tactics in the jungle on sniping missions. Another difference was that unlike Iraq and Afghanistan where sniper teams, especially with the 50 MG could now be a force multiplier almost anywhere, Jungle snipers had a limited effectiveness back then, but ironically still turned out to be the most ‘cost’ effective kill-for-kill, if you were a bean counter, lol!

But although my certificate of completion of the course hangs with other ‘debris’ of wars and such in my ‘cave’, i never actually deployed as a sniper. On my first hands on mission test, and barely being able to hump the field pack that made the ones in ‘Lone Survivor’ look like summer fanny packs, you even had to squat-hunch under the pack on the ground and stand up through in order to get it on your back, and being eaten alive by every monster known to exist while intentionally dragging your chin in the muck crawling around on your belly which was their deli, for hours at a crack without getting up, I declined to actually deploy as a sniper.

Back in those days you could do what you want if you were an A team leader. I preferred a nice comfortable base camp by day, and standing up when i fought and i loved the smell of C4 from firing Claymores on night ambushes instead of crawling around in stinky went jungle shit constantly picking land leaches off my balls. Plus, the way we ‘played’ at the time, i thought i could do better in body counts than i could doing one shot one kill type of stuff. But now, i realize, that’s different. Snipers are probably one of the most valuable assets available for both cost effectiveness and effective tactical utility.

Later on I did sniper training for police and then some ‘private contracting work’ overseas. And I kind of agree with Ben on the fact that it takes a combination of natural talent and good training. Like a Navy Seal has to be born part fish to even make it through the training, or fighter pilots have hollow bones and better than 20/20 vision.

But i agree with Ben that ‘Flinch-jerking’ is the main problem with shooting accurately with anything but absolutely imperative in precision sniping. The way he described is the best way to lick the problem. Loading your pistol or rifle with one empty or thinking you have a full mag when you don’t and trying to fire on an empty chamber and you will get ‘caught’ if you’re flinching, or jerking.

They use to tell us to make sure the cross hairs are not moving around before you fire, and don’t let any other body movement, including your trigger finger affect the steadiness of the cross hairs either. As far as breathing, they said to simply stop breathing wherever it felt comfortable right at the start of the trigger press. I do it on the top of the inhale.

As far as trying to time heart beats, that all sounds good in theory and even some practice but from my humble experience the heart rate will always increase under stress of getting killed or adrenalin surge of ‘the kill’, no matter how much you train, unless you also spent a half lifetime in a Buddhist Monastery focusing on training your organs. So much so that you might become too distracted from the shot itself by becoming preoccupied with ‘slowing it down’. so i never try to time it, I just ignore it by focusing on sight movement and trigger press coordination and only that. It is still a good thing to train and practice if you can’ I mention it to not become discouraged if you simply can’t coordinate it all. You can still obtain precision accuracy that works all the time.

I don’t really know what i personally do anymore, when it comes right down to it. All that counts is that i never miss.

The other thing is that since the big thing with ‘sniping’ is that the barrel be MOA accurate, what does that really mean?
In the ‘MOA out of the box’ article you explained the technical milradian definition, but what does that have to do with ‘accurate’ combat sniping?

Over simplifying it for all practical shooting purposes, the laws of geometry and physics and other variables of trajectory of a shot provide that whatever the moa of a shot is close the barrel, 100 meters for instance as the standard, the angle will increase out to a circle in degrees, becoming wider the further out you go. Meaning the shot placement will start to spread from the point of aim. This is actually pretty predictable at various distances.

A general rule is that if your bullets impact within an inch at 100 meters, the group will open to 2 inches at 200 meters, 3 3 inches at 300 meters, 4@4 5@5 and so on, until you reach the real ‘point blank range’–(not the one’s used in pulp fiction phraseology),. which means the maximum range at which the majority of your shots will still hit a standard center mass body target plate which is about 12 x 8 inches before the minutes of angle open up bigger and no longer are capable of an accurate hit where you are aiming. Doesn’t mean they can’t kill you at a farther range. It just means that likelihood of you hitting where you’re aiming is not there anymore at that distance. So whatever that distance is, and it’s longer if you’re shooting tighter moa close in, is your max point blank range, or max effective target aquisition range. Just to split pussy hairs a bit here, this is NOT the same as maximum effective killing range. Which is always much farther. Which is why, despite the odds, WWII German and Russian and British snipers often took greater than 1000 meter shots. There was a target, you had the opportunity, why not try it even though it wasn’t likely you’d hit. Many of them got pretty lucky!

So for a 1 MOA barrel, your max range effective range is really not much more than a thousand meters for most rounds/guns of 30-06 or lighter. And that won’t be a precision head shot. Yes, of course guys like Ben, here made regular 2000 meter shots in Iraq but they were using heavier calibers with more power and they were professionals.

But we’re speaking here only of barrel accuracy and physics. So what all this means is that the tighter the groups in terms of minute of angle in inch reference, the longer distance you’ll be able to shoot ‘accurately’ everything else notwithstanding, but certainly helping, like ballistic co-efficiency of the bullet itself, of course power, and probably most importantly for actually hitting your target first shot, is ‘bullet trajectory drop’, and wind deflection.

So what does this really mean? It means don’t waste good ammo. Don’t try 600 meter shots with your 3 moa AK on a windy day if you don’t want to give away your position by firing all those shots without hitting anything. And remember, even that .5 moa tack driving 5.56 after 600 meters starts to have the foot pound energy of a .22 long rifle, so you might be able to hit it within the rifle’s ‘point blank range’, you might not kill it.

That’s why international military sniper competition has their max range targets under 400 meters.

One last thing, if i might add, The range training can help, and all discipline requires absolute mastery of fundamental actions, This is essential for CONSISTENT accurate shooting. But always remember that All snipers are marksmen. But not all marksmen, are snipers.

Well done instructional, Ben. Eagerly looking forward to the series.