South Carolina

Successes in South Carolina

We had another great weekend at The Clinton House in South Carolina. This is our third year, and each year has been better than the one before. Mike Johnson, who runs the place, has done a great job in improving the courses, adding a third course this year. With the wide variety of targets, this is a great place to teach and for our students to learn.

Each day we began with the animations and got everyone on the same page so they all wanted to go out and shoot immediately afterward. Between South Carolina football and hunting season opening, it was a busy place to be.

Training Young Shooters on Hard Targets

The state has a big group of youngsters shooting and we had several of the coaches come to the clinic. And on Sunday, we had three young people shooting. In my group, I had 10, 12, and 14-year-old young men. The 10 and 12-year-old had been shooting for some time and really wanted to shoot hard targets, but couldn’t define a hard target. So we just went around the course trying to find one. It wasn’t easy. They were very good shots, but eventually, I was able to stump them a little.

They were so funny because they wanted to try all the guns and at lunch, they wanted to fish, at least until it was time to shoot again. Then they were all for shooting again.

I had a father and son that were very new to shooting, who had bought the father’s gun the day before. It was a lightweight field gun, and by the end of the day, he was sore. The son was using an automatic and shot “lights out” by the end of the day. When you have kids of that age, there isn’t a lot you can do except let them shoot and correct very little. As they are in one of the fastest stages of growing myelin, their job is to fire the circuits. They did – and had a ball doing it. At that age, they grow the myelin around the neural circuits five times faster than a 50-year-old.

The old saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is not exactly correct; it just takes a little longer to grow the skill.

Practice Your Gun Mount!

I had a lady in my group who had been shooting a while and not getting any better. She wanted to learn to teach the ladies at her club. There are many differences between teaching ladies and men, in case you didn’t know.

She had been taught by her husband, but there were many things that were confusing to her, so we sorted those out to help her shooting and help other women in her area. The biggest thing that she realized is that she really needed to work on her gun mount. She had been shooting with the gun already mounted, so getting it down away from her face so she could see the target was a big thing. She did try for two days to have the gun lower, but it was a little frustrating to her as it didn’t come to the same place on her face each time.

This is a game of consistency. If the gun doesn’t come to the same place on your cheek each time, you can’t be consistent. This was a big lesson to learn for everyone.

I don’t know why everyone thinks they can shoot this game with their head down on the stock. It doesn’t work that way. You have to have your eyes away from the muzzle to give the brain the time to make the calculations on the target and make the move and mount. If we could just get everyone to learn to mount the gun, it would be so much more beneficial to make this game a little easier.

On to St. Louis next week and new experiences.