Proper sight picture is important. Correct sight picture means you have edge-to-edge clarity with no shadowing of any kind. If you find shadowing, even a small amount, it is recommended that you move the scope or move the cheek piece to line up the shooter’s eye directly behind the optic. Eliminating any angle is key. Your head should be square with the ocular lens of the scope so that your head quickly and naturally aligns to the proper sight picture. Any shadowing seen in the sight picture is a result of the eye looking at the inside of the scope tube. Building up the cheek rest or moving the scope to the eye will help eliminate this. Proper sight picture is key because that is going to tell us where the bullet is going to go.
How Do We Check for Parallax?
Back in the old days, most day optics had the parallax set at the factory. There was no adjustment on the scope. They usually set them around 150 yards to suit the average hunter. With most optics under 10x, parallax is not a big issue. It gets worse with magnification, so it is not uncommon to find an optic less than 10x with no parallax adjustment. We are referencing modern higher-powered optics with a parallax adjustment.
To check for parallax, line up the reticle on a target and move your head ever so slightly, side to side, or up and down. Don’t move your head enough to cause shadowing to appear around the edges. Use very small motions, to see if the reticle appears to “float” on the target. A way to demonstrate this is to take a pencil tip and hold it out between you and some object a distance away. When you move your head, the target will move away from the pencil tip, this is parallax. But, if you move the pencil tip on top of the target object so it is touching, then move your head, the pencil stays in place. We want to re-create this through the scope by adjusting the movement out. Just remember, in some optics, focus is not parallax and being parallax-free might put you out of perfect focus.
Much of sight picture is established when setting up the rifle. We don’t want to hunt for the proper sight picture, something I notice a lot of new shooter do. We want to fall in behind the stock and have our head naturally aligned to the optic.
The scope should be set up in position, placed on maximum power, if using a variable-power optic, and then fine-tuned in place. At this point, lowering the magnification for different positions will open up the eye relief, thus creating a more forgiving eye box. This minor compromise is necessary as different positions will move the head ever so slightly behind the scope.
Breathing
We do not want to focus on our breathing. Let’s start off by saying we need to breathe. Period. Holding your breath is the last thing you want to do when shooting. When we are hammering a nail or driving our cars, we don’t think about our breathing. Correct? Instead, we continue to breathe normally. The same thing applies when shooting a rifle. What we need to know about breathing while shooting is where to break the shot, which is at the bottom of our natural respiratory pause.
Let me repeat that: Break the shot at the bottom of our natural respiratory pause.
For years, people were taught to take a deep breath, let it halfway out and hold it. This is incorrect, and in many ways counter to achieving accurate fire. Why? Because we have no way of knowing what “halfway” is under typical circumstances, and we have no concept of how long we are actually holding our breath. The longer we continue with this practice, the longer we will hold our breath, and the first thing affected is our eyes. Your vision becomes impaired, your body begins to strain and you’re no longer in a relaxed state.
We all have a natural respiratory pause, even if we are running with 80 pounds on our backs; there is a bottom of the breathing cycle. That is where we break the shot. If your shot is not lined up right immediately, continue to breathe until it is. The best part about this is, under stress, we can exaggerate the process to help us breathe through a physical event.
We do not have to tell our body to breathe heavily when exerting ourselves. It just does it naturally. In order to clear out of this condition, we need to breathe more and not less. So, holding your breath in the case of shooting is a very bad thing and does not make the shooter steady. We just turn on a few pieces inside our brain that give us the appearance of being steady. We have image stabilization behind our eyes.
Breathing is my personal Achilles’ heel. I find myself reverting to bad habits all the time and, in my case, holding my breath is that bad habit. Oxygen deprivation is not the issue here, carbon dioxide is. We have hypersensitive carbon dioxide sensors in our brains that immediately throw up warning signs when they detect elevated levels. We can hold our breath for at least a minute before a pulse-ox will measure it, however the brain is reacting inside and will compromise us on the firing line.
Trigger Control
Trigger control is defined as the manipulation of the trigger without disturbing the rifle or the lay of the sights on the target. Most errors when shooting can be attributed to improper manipulation of the trigger. In fact, we are such creatures of habit, we can improperly actuate the trigger over and over yet still manage to group well. This is the most influential point, because we are turning on the machine. Pressing the trigger to the rear starts the process. In most people’s minds it is also the end, which causes them to inadvertently affect the shot placement. We literally beat the bullet out of the bore by moving the rifle and altering the sights off the target. In some cases, the shooters are so relieved at having fired the shot that they immediately disengage from the rifle. This is a bad idea.
Look at the trigger finger when placed on the shoe. Is your finger starting and stopping at 3 o’clock (or 9 o’clock for a right-handed shooter) when manipulating the trigger?
The purpose of the firing hand is to manipulate the trigger and hold the rifle into the shoulder pocket. We aren’t gripping it like a handgun, rather holding it straight back to the rear. This requires very little pressure, so we don’t want to have a death grip on it. The shooter should establish a firing position on the stock that starts from the trigger back and not from the stock forward. This is more a mental process than a literal one, as we don’t want people putting their fingers on a live-weapon trigger first. The initial practice should have the shooter visualize the trigger finger before the grip. You can do this during dry practice, which is highly recommended.
We want to place the trigger shoe squarely on the pad of the finger, creating a 90-degree angle with the finger and second joint. This will vary slightly from shooter to shooter based on their hands, and type of stock, but the goal should be to get the fingernail to point to 9 o’clock for a right-handed shooter, 3 o’clock for a left-handed shooter. This right-angle position should be there before the trigger is pressed and remain there afterward. Shooters who find their trigger fingers curling or even flying off the shoe, need to work on their trigger control and follow-through.
When addressing the stock, regardless of the type, we want to make sure the movement of the trigger finger is not touching the stock. In the old days, they called this “dragging wood” for the obvious reasons. If the trigger finger is resting against the stock, you will influence the rifle, which is not good. As our skin moves, it compresses the muscles and pushes our flesh out under the skin creating a lateral movement on the stock.
The trigger finger should be moving like a hinge, straight to the rear using our body mechanics to our advantage. If the fingernail starts at 9 o’clock and ends at 9 o’clock, you can rest assured you are manipulating the trigger straight back to the rear. In many cases, you’ll find the finger is moving much less than it moves if you are incorrectly pressing the trigger shoe.
Press, break and freeze. That is the mantra.
The three fingers below the trigger finger should be pressing the stock straight back into the shoulder pocket. The pressure should not be so great to discolor them visually. We want to develop a front-to-back management of the stock, and the thumb