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  COLUMNS      
May/June 2010
 
                     
  Shooting Iron      
                     
  Grouping Groupies      
                     
       
                     
 

Group shooting in and of itself is meaningless. It has taken me over three decades to fully realize that fact. The purpose of a handgun is not to shoot groups, and in fact nobody ever shot anything with a group. The sole purpose of a handgun is to direct a bullet to a specific point, whether it is a paper target, a tin can or flesh. Each shot is an individual act.

So how did groups become the be-all and end-all in some people’s minds? It happened because groups are shot to determine the level and consistency of a handgun’s precision. But group shooting is fraught with the possibility for errors. Most all of us avid handgunners have a group or two taped to our gun room walls. But there is one indisputable fact. A single group is only a record of what that handgun did with those five, 10 or however many shots in that specific instance.

Consider the following. A superb 5-shot group can be, and often is, a fluke. A superb 10-shot group is less of a fluke, and a superb 25- or 50-shot group actually begins to give an indication of what that specific load delivers from that specific handgun. Four or five groups of five shots are a better indication of a handgun’s precision, just as four or five 10-shot groups or four or five 25-shot groups are “more better.” But who in the world has the time or gumption to do that? So, most “gun tests” use the lazy man’s five shot groups.

And then there is the shooter-factor to consider. By shooter-factor I mean how well the trigger was pulled and the sights aligned, with the understanding that muscle and eyesight fatigue are related factors. Obviously a shooter is going to be capable of firing a better group at the beginning of a session than he will after an hour or two of constant shooting.

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