Written by: Greg Ellifritz
My friend Claude Werner recently wrote an article where he postulated most shooters don’t do any real structured practice with their firearms. They plink or play, but they generally don’t perform drills designed with realistic standards in order to improve performance. In the article, Claude talked about sharing details and photos of his practice routines to give novice shooters an idea about how they might better spend their practice time.
I think that is a wonderful idea. I plan on sharing the drills I shoot in my weekly practice sessions. Hopefully, you will get a little value out of my posts and come up with some new drills to make your own practice sessions more effective.
My weekly practice sessions are continuing to be reduced in frequency by daily life activities. It was almost three weeks since I last shot. This practice session is going to be a little different. I shot it right before I went to Peru. Before I travel to foreign countries, I usually practice a bit with whatever handgun people carry in the region. In Peru, that’s a .38 revolver.
I broke out one of my four inch S&W Model 10s and started the practice session as always with the Guerilla Approach Consistency Drill. It was definitely a lot harder with a six shot revolver and speedloaders!
Round 1 (Model 10) – with four misses = 66.86
Round 2 (Glock 17)- with three misses = 25.24
Revolver on top. G-17 below.
I then did a little more work with my G-17, shooting the Haley Strategic Switching Gears drill. I ran the first part of the test at 23.95. I ran the whole sheet at 73.91 with a couple misses.
Then I went back to the 4″ Model 10 .38 revolver. I wanted a little more practice with that one because “acquiring” one of them from a security guard might be my best bet for arming myself in Peru.
Because the security guards who carry these revolvers rarely carry spare ammunition (and the ammunition they do carry is 158 grain lead roundnose), I knew I had to focus on extreme accuracy and making fast head shots. One round of round nose .38 to the chest isn’t a likely stopper and I wouldn’t have extra bullets to spare, so I planned on using more head shots than I normally would. The combination of faster stops and less ammunition used is exactly the solution I needed. Reloads weren’t likely to be possible, let alone a realistic option, so I didn’t waste any time working on them.
I put a full sized silhouette target up at 30 feet. I ran two cylinders of ammunition through the revolver on each stage. I shot each stage from the ready position because I was unlikely to be using a holster for a gun I had to steal from an unsuspecting security guard.
– Six fast body shots
-Three body shots right hand only
– Three body shots left hand only
– Two to the body and one to the head
– One to the body and one to the head
– Single head shots as fast as I could make my hits
With 100 rounds fired, I felt pretty good about my abilities to use a .38 revolver if necessary.
Back to a more “normal” practice session next week.
