He'd never shot the Winchester before, so we hauled the target in to see how his grouping was. There were nine holes in the paper.
Cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone. It had been a fresh target, and counting the number of bullets left in the box confirmed that he'd only shot five. What the heck?
I think that this is what happened. The folks in the next lane were shooting pistols at a target 5 yards out. I think that one of them lined up on his target in a way that had him lining up on ours as well.
I've done my poor best to recreate the scene of the, err, crime. Lanes are around six feet wide, and 75 feet long (25 yards). Lanes are separated by armored shields, which are (more or less) a foot wide.
Our lane is shown in blue, with our target way down at 75 feet. We were shooting straight down the lane at the target, shown as the solid blue line bisecting the lane. Our neighbors' lane is shown in red, with their target at 15 feet.
And here's the thing - I think that one of our neighbors wasn't shooting straight down the lane. I think that he was lined up at the far edge of the lane, and when he shot at his target, the bullet's path carried it across into our lane, and though our target (diagonal red line).
Has anyone ever seen this sort of thing before? It was pretty obvious that someone had been shooting at the target (besides us, I mean); this is a bit of guesswork on how that might have happened.
And the important question: is it OK to score these five shots as higher than 50?
It happens quite often just as you've described though I'm surprised that they landed five shots on your target. They're either very consistent in their shooting or were firing a huge number of rounds.
ReplyDeleteHat Trick, they were shooting a lot. ;-)
ReplyDelete"Has anyone ever seen this sort of thing before?"
ReplyDeleteYep, but the times I have seen it happen is because of range clowns doing it on purpose.
When I was in the navy, we had a bunch of Phillipinos who's rifle skills were ...lacking.
ReplyDeleteIt was so bad that they closed all but three lanes just to see where they were aiming.
Turned out that they didn't understand the whole concept of your firing position =your target#.
The "proper" way to score the target, since you can't tell who shot what by the size of the hole, is to score the five highest hits as yours, obviously, and disregard the others.
ReplyDeletefoxfire
I see this all the time at the local range, which has targets from 5-200 yds. I line up my pistol targets so that this does not happen, but it's an easy mistake to make.
ReplyDelete