The Everyday Marksman

I'm going to ruffle some feathers today. In fact, I'm highlighting something I've been doing poorly for years. While I was putting together the hierarchy of physical fitness for the Martial Marksman, I realized there was a need to do the same thing for firearms training and marksmanship. We tend to focus on the things we're already good at, or at least the things we most enjoy. For me, that tends to be scoped precision rifles and relatively long distances. That's fine for a general interest, of course, since fun is allowed. However, if my focus was on cultivating the Martial Marksman skill set, the priorities would look very different.

So here's the challenge: can we establish a standard set of training priorities for the average person preparing for Scenario-X? I think we can.

Setting the Boundaries

First off, my goal is less about dictating what weapon to become proficient with than it is about establishing what distances you should focus on. In some cases, the distances involved naturally lend themselves to specific weapon types. Rather than force that on you, I'm stating the range bracket and letting you decide what weapon platform makes the most sense for you and your circumstances to meet the requirement.

Second, most marksmanship training standards focus on an angular standard like 4 MOA (minutes of angle). This works ok, honestly. It's rather convenient to tell someone to always train for a 4 MOA standard, and then adjust the size of the target based on the range they have access to. At 100 yards, that's a 4 inch target. At 50 yards, it's 2 inches, and 1 inch at 25. Or if you shoot at 200 yards, the target is 8". However, when you think about the context of a Martial Marksman, targets stay the same size regardless of the distance. This is something I picked up from John Simpson's latest book, and it's an important point to consider.

Example Time

Here's an example. Let's say the target is a circle eight inches in diameter. The target is always 8" regardless of the distance. At 200 yards, that target is about 4 MOA. However, at 50 yards, the target is still 8" and is now approximately 16 MOA. Your perception is that the target is now much larger even if it's the same size it always was. What does that mean in practice? It means that your priority should be hitting the target even faster, not necessarily "more accurately."

In the Martial Marksman's world, there are not bonus points for hitting the 1" x-ring if any hit on the 8" black would have done. Taking the extra time to hit the x-ring might mean losing to the opponent who sought to be just fast enough to hit you first. In the real world, that means coming in second place during a gun fight. For our purposes, the goal is hitting a target of set dimensions at a variety of distances with as much speed as possible.

Establishing the Target

Training principle #1 for the Martial Marksman is train for the target. So what is it that we're looking to hit? I've theorized on it before, and now it's time to make it official.

The target of a Martial Marksman is a 10" circle. For practice, you could go as low tech as a common 10" paper picnic plate, but I'll get a little more specific and say that the official training target is an