13,99 €
This invaluable, well-illustrated book presents a carefully crafted, step-by-step programme which teaches the complete novice air pistol shooter how to attain a high level of marksmanship. The training begins with a detailed consideration of safety procedures, basic pistol craft, range construction and the types of air pistol that are available (spring-powered, pneumatic and CO2) and how they work. The author then moves on to consider holsters, targets, and the advanced skills associated with trigger control, the hold, presentation, the stance, the fast draw and rapid fire shooting. Finally, detailed attention is paid to markmanship exercises but the author emphasizes that these should only be undertaken after all of the techniques set out in the previous chapters have been mastered.
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Seitenzahl: 163
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
First published in 2013 by
The Crowood Press Ltd
Ramsbury, Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2013
© John Bezzant 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84797 649 9
Disclaimer
1 The Law, Safety Procedures and Range Layout
2 Types of Air Pistol
3 Holsters
4 The Draw, Presentation, Stance and Hold
5 Marksmanship Exercises
6 Targets
7 Trigger Control
Glossary
Index
Colt semi-automatic.
Smith & Wesson revolver.
Understanding the laws governing the ownership and use of an air pistol is the essential starting point for anyone wishing to take up the pastime of pistol shooting.
Let us begin with a clear definition of the term ‘air pistol’. An air pistol is a pistol that uses air as the propulsive force to discharge a projectile: this applies to both spring-operated pistols and ‘pneumatic’ pistols. The designation ‘air pistol’ is also given to pistols powered by compressed CO2 (carbon dioxide), though strictly speaking such pistols are gas-powered as they use CO2 gas rather than air. In the UK the legal upper limit for the power output of an air pistol is 6ft/lb: any air pistol with a greater power output than this is illegal and the use or ownership of it would leave you open to prosecution under the law.
In the USA, where gun laws are far less stringent, air pistols can exhibit 30ft/lb of power or more, but such a high level of power is not really necessary. Certainly, the greater the power the greater the range. But long-range shooting cannot be classified as more challenging than close-range shooting as both can be practised in such a manner that marksmanship is tested to the fullest extent. The key to this is the selection of the appropriately scaled target for the range being shot over. At 1 mile a skilled rifleman could hit a grapefruit but not a five pence coin. At 10yd a grapefruit would be a huge target that would be hard to miss, but a five pence coin would present a considerable challenge for any marksman. The law may only allow us to use a pistol of very low power, but such a limitation does not stop the knowledgeable shooter from engaging in extreme challenges of skill.
A legal air pistol is, then, a pistol that is air or CO2 powered that does not exhibit more than 6ft/lb of power, but who can own such a pistol? There is no requirement for a firearms certificate of any kind in order to own an air pistol: the only legal requirement for the ownership of an air pistol is that the owner be aged 18 years or more. Under the age of 18 ownership of an air pistol is an offence, so you cannot make a gift of an air pistol to anyone under the age of 18. However, this does not prohibit persons under the age of 18 from shooting an air pistol: from the age of 14 it is legal for a youngster to use an air pistol unsupervised on land where permission has been given by the landowner for the youngster to shoot. The air pistol they use must, however, only be on loan and be owned by a person of 18 or over.
Under the age of 14 a youngster may only use an air pistol under the strict supervision of a person aged 21 or above. The law does not stipulate that the supervising adult needs to posses any form of coaching certificate or that they should be able to prove competency in any other way. To my mind there should be a minimum standard that is recognized by some kind of registration before a person is allowed to give tuition to youngsters, for simply attaining the age of 21 does not qualify a person to teach safe pistol handling skills. You will find that most of those using air weapons of one kind or another will ardently object to any kind of licensing scheme, but I am not one. I believe that before anyone is allowed to own an air weapon they should have to attend a compulsory three-hour teaching session at a rifle club that results in the awarding of a certificate of basic competency. Why this simple measure is not put into law is beyond me, as it would ensure that all air weapons users would have a firm grounding in correct safety procedures, which is not the case at present.
No person under the age of 18 may legally transport an air pistol through a public place. When transporting an air pistol in a public place, do not be tempted to carry the pistol in a holster beneath your clothing for such a method of carry is not legal. If you were foolish enough to carry an air pistol in such a ‘concealed carry’ mode you could find yourself being stopped by armed police officers and, since many air pistols look identical to live-fire pistols, you would be placing yourself in a very dangerous situation. Air pistols when transported must be carried in some form of secure facility, such as an aluminium case.
The law does not go into what is meant by a secure facility but I interpret it as referring to a lockable facility. When transporting pistols they must be unloaded and it is not sufficient for the magazine to be removed from the pistol: the magazine itself must be in what is termed a ‘non-battery state’, that is to say, the magazine must be completely empty of projectiles. It is also a good idea to carry your ammunition and magazines in separate lockable facilities.
The simple answer to this question is on any land where the permission of the landowner has been given for shooting to take place. There is no stipulation as to the type of land: so as long as you have full permission, you can shoot on farmland, in the back garden or upon recreational land. There is one restriction, however, and that is that you may not shoot within 15yd of the centre of a public highway, footpath or bridleway. Even if you have the landowner’s permission to shoot upon the land, if you are shooting within 15yd of the centre of one of these rights of way you are committing an offence.
It is perfectly legal for a person to shoot an air pistol in their back garden, but you must bear in mind that any projectile fired by you that leaves the boundaries of your garden and enters the property of another will put you in breach of the law. Should that projectile strike a family pet, a child or property you will find yourself in very serious trouble, and rightly so.
If someone objects to your shooting you could begin by explaining that your activities are legal, but if they still object you should try to work out some kind of solution to any problems they may have. You could for example show the person with objections the stringent safety set-up that you have established in terms of your shooting range, and demonstrate the fact that air pistols exhibit a very low level of noise.
The correct means of carry when transporting pistols – a sturdy, lockable case.
It is perfectly legal to shoot an air pistol in a back garden, but the question you must ask yourself is: is it safe? This question has to be taken very seriously because, legally, it is your responsibility to ensure that the air pistol is used in a safe and responsible manner. That means keeping any projectile fired within your boundaries, so you must understand how to build a suitable range. If the range you build is inadequate and a projectile is released onto someone else’s land, you will be held accountable.
The construction of a range that is extremely safe to use will not be difficult for most people, the key to building a safe range being to use the right materials for its construction and the right dimensions. The purpose of a range is to capture each and every projectile that you fire from your pistols; this means not only those that maintain their forward trajectory after striking the target, but also those that ricochet in an upwards, sideways or rearwards direction. Ricochets occur when the pellet strikes a surface that is to hard for it to penetrate and so, like a rubber ball, it bounces off. Sometimes when a pellet strikes a hard surface it will flatten on impact, which has the effect of dissipating its energy, and it will drop harmlessly to the floor, but if the pellet maintains its shape partially or in full it will bounce back. A ricocheting pellet that has been discharged by a legal air pistol is unlikely to ricochet much more than 10yd, and the ricochet will generally be in a rearwards direction and slightly off to one side of the initial flight path. These ricochets only very rarely hit the shooter but it can happen, which is why eye protection should be worn when pistol shooting. The power of a ricochet is of course less than the power of the initial shot, but there is sufficient power to cause blindness should a strike occur to an unprotected eye; a strike to any other area of the body will not cause serious injury.
It is possible to eliminate the risk of ricochet by ensuring that nothing on the range is constructed of a material that is too hard for a pellet to penetrate. The main culprits are hard wood and stone. When a pellet strikes metal too thick to penetrate it generally flattens and falls to the floor, which is why metal targets are safe to use and why metal pellet traps are able to capture pellets. If we ensure that no hard objects are present on our range we almost completely remove the risk of ricochet. We can never say that the risk is completely removed because freak events can occur, but if every possible effort has been made to remove the risk of ricochet, then we are acting in a responsible manner and so are within the law.
If hard objects are not permitted in range construction, then of what should the range be made? The backstop must be a material that is soft enough for a pellet to penetrate while offering sufficient depth that the pellet cannot pass completely through and so becomes captured in the backstop. I have tried many different materials and the best by far for this purpose is straw bales. They are soft enough to be easily penetrated by a pellet but so dense that not even a firearms-rated air rifle could send a pellet clean through a bale, let alone an air pistol.
The backstop should be some 8ft (2.4m) in length, which offers more than enough overlap to capture missed shots. When you first begin to learn the skill of pistol shooting, only use the centre 2ft (60cm) of the range, which will give a 3ft (90cm) overlap on either side. When you are more accomplished it will be safe to use the centre 6ft (1.8m), which will allow a 2ft (60cm) overlap on either side, which offers a very healthy safety margin. The backstop should be 4ft (1.2m) high, which will allow you to engage targets that are at different levels from ground level up to 3ft (90cm) high. When you first begin pistol shooting, only use low-lying targets so that you have a good 2ft (60cm) overlap above the target, but when you have become accomplished 1ft (30cm) will do the job. You may think that I am being somewhat excessive with my width and height overlaps but when people begin to use a pistol it is not uncommon for them to miss by a foot or more and even experienced rifle shots have found themselves missing the mark by some margin, so my suggested overlaps are not a luxury but a necessity for the safe and responsible shooter.
The range.
The target line for mounting targets.
Straw bales measure roughly 2ft (60cm) long and just over 1ft (30cm) high, so about sixteen bales will make a backstop 8 × 4ft (2.4 × 1.2m) high. If you raise the bales off the floor by placing them on a frame of soft timber 2 × 4in (5 × 10cm) so as to prevent moisture entering the bales from below, and place a wooden board on top of the bales to form a roof, they will last literally for years.
You can use sand as a backstop if you wish, but you will require a large quantity of sand and you also have to manufacture a structure to contain the sand in such a way that it creates a sloping face. This is expensive and time-consuming, and once the range is built it is a permanent structure; conversely, a backstop constructed out of straw bales is inexpensive, can be built in an afternoon and is moveable as it can be taken down any time you please.
The backstop should be located in front of a solid object such as a wall or a sturdy, gap-free fence. Alternatively, it can be located at the base of a slope or, if you live in the countryside, it could be placed with a large area of open ground behind it. The object here is to create a safe area behind the backstop: the backstop has been designed to capture all the projectiles you shoot down the range, but in the unlikely event that a projectile does find liberty by some freak accident, then the precaution of a safe area behind the range will ensure that the projectile is rendered harmless. By acting in this manner you are once again behaving in a responsible manner and acting in accordance with the law regarding the safe shooting of an air pistol.
Now that the backstop has been established you need to decide where you are going to locate your firing station: the place from which you will be shooting. The firing station should be 5, 7 or 10yd (4.5, 2 or 9m) away from the backstop. Going beyond 10yd is not necessary as this distance offers all that is needed for performing all manner of marksmanship tests. If you only have 5yd then that’s fine; it is even possible to test a pistol shooter at 5yd by reducing the size of the targets and increasing the speed at which the shots are delivered, so do not worry if your space is limited. The minimum space for an effective range is therefore 8ft wide for the backstop and 15ft long from backstop to the firing station. The optimum, if it is available, is 8ft wide by 30ft long, so almost any back garden, town or country, can provide an area with sufficient dimensions to create an effective and safe air pistol range if a small amount of money is spent and a little bit of time is given to the construction.
You may well have seen some shooters using nothing more than a pellet trap measuring roughly 10in (25cm) square, this being a metal box that holds a paper target so that any pellet entering the target is caught in the box. The shooter will most likely have the pellet trap mounted on a wooden post and they will consider this set-up perfectly safe. Well, it would be if you could guarantee to hit the paper target every single time, which is possible for a skilled marksman, but you only have to miss that pellet trap once and you have at liberty a projectile that could travel roughly 300yd. Miss once and you could hit something or someone that will land you in trouble with the law; that one miss could end up causing injury or maybe even death, and all for the want of a properly constructed backstop.
Most professionally constructed ranges will offer roughly 4ft (1.2m) of range space per shooter and for the skilled and experienced pistol marksman who is only going to miss the mark by 2–3mm a backstop of 4ft would be more than adequate to deal with any missed shots. For the beginner and the less skilled, however, a much greater overlap should be employed, and the recommendation of those involved in the construction of ranges for professional users such as police departments is that an 8ft (2.4m) backstop is the optimum size.
Some may say that my stipulations are far in excess of what is needed and that a much smaller backstop could be employed, but here I must strongly disagree. A range should not be constructed to the minimum requirements; rather, it should be constructed to exceed the requirements of all expected mishaps so that it is more than adequate to cope with those unexpected occurrences that happen every now and then.
When I was serving in the Royal Air Force there was an incident where too many air-men where practising on a range and the airman on the end of the line did not have sufficient range space: when he missed the target, the bullet went down the side of the range and struck the tail of an aeroplane. The limited amount of range space that the unfortunate airman had available was sufficient in theory and would have been adequate for a very consistent marksman, but something went wrong and the limited range space was not sufficient to deal with the error of marksmanship. The range had been used in the same manner many times and the space had proved adequate, but on this one occasion when the unexpected happened – a normally good marksman missed by an unusually large degree – the policy of working on the smallest requirement for a backstop caused a deadly bullet to be set at liberty and it is fortunate that it came to rest in the tail of an aircraft and not in the head of a passing airman. The story illustrates very well the point that if you limit yourself to the minimum requirement for a backstop you are opening yourself up to a potential range failure, while if you work on the basis of providing a backstop in excess of that which is needed, you eliminate the danger of a range failure.
The area that I term the firing station should consist of a small table or bench behind which you stand to fire. On it there needs to be an open-ended box like an upside-down filing tray made out of soft wood, and whenever you place the pistol down it goes into the box barrel first with the safety on and the magazine removed. The pistol goes into the box when you are reloading magazines or when you go forward to check or set up targets, or whenever you want to place the pistol down for some other reason.