Enlarging the International Shooting competitor pool

[jackh]

smokin357
Years of using both dot and irons have convinced me that you are off base with your opinions here. To explain my point of view - Dots are easier in my opinion to gain a level of shooting up to about 85% score. Then to improve above that (debatable) level, irons or dot are pretty much equally demanding. Dots definitely make it easier for the aging eyes to get to that certain level. Beyond that, age, vision, dot or irons don't really matter. How one dedicates and applys the fundamentals is the main part of shooting. I do wish new young shooters would not bypass the irons. The well rounded >bullseye< shooter will shoot both.

[mikeschroeder]

smokin357
.....Dots definitely make it easier for the aging eyes to get to that certain level. Beyond that, age, vision, dot or irons don't really matter. How one dedicates and applys the fundamentals is the main part of shooting. I do wish new young shooters would not bypass the irons. The well rounded shooter will shoot both.

I agree with the DOTs making it easier to get to 85%. I also agree with the fact that sight alignment and trigger control is more important. If you're using irons as you're supposed to, you only need to see well enough to see the FRONT SIGHT clearly. Center the front sight between the back two fuzzy blobs, and put the centered front sight under the round fuzzy blob at the end of the range.

Personally, I bought a Ruger Mark II and put an ultradot on it. I was able to shoot in the 90's for Slow Fire, Timed Fire, and Rapid Fire. Then I bought a .45 ACP with iron sights and dropped my .22 scores back to 80%. I took the dot off the .22 and now I'm slowly climbing again.

I would also state that you should become a master level shooter in either irons or dots before "becoming well rounded" and being able to shoot both.

Just my $0.02

Mike
Wichita KS

[David Levene]

The well rounded shooter will shoot both.

As someone who has always specialised in, and concentrated on, ISSF pistol shooting I do not recognise the term "well rounded" as being of any benefit to the shooter who wants to advance (unless you are talking about my waistline of course ;^) ).

It may well be that some shooters can be extremely good in different codes but that is not a pre-requisite for excelling in one.

There is absolutely no reason why an ISSF pistol shooter would go anywhere near a red dot. Does that make him/her less of a shooter.

We could of course have a language useage difference here.

[Mike McDaniel]

There are a lot of problems involved here, with no one solution.

I agree that USAS does a very poor job of explaining how to get on the team. Whether there is a certain amount of judgement involved in the final team selection is immaterial - there needs to be a clearly written process, readily available to the shooters.

I also agree that USAS has a general bias toward very young shooters, a bias that hurts them greatly. Shooting is NOT a spandex sport, and older shooters are at no particular disadvantage. Indeed, I would argue that older competitors have better mental discipline, as well as far more money. The idea that a shooter needs to be hunting a college scholarship IN SHOOTING is absurd. He needs an education that will support a lifetime of competition, not four years and a swift kick out the door.

As to dots, I think the Europeans have the right idea. BIG iron sights. American sights are usually very, very small. Marginal for young eyes, terrible for old ones. Go with the big European sights, open the rear sight notch wide, and you will be shocked at how easy it is to shoot iron sights again. (I have no dog in the fight. Black powder competition requires iron sights. Period.)

[David Levene]

Black powder competition requires iron sights.

As of course does ISSF pistol shooting (even if they are not actually made of iron).

[Pradeep5]

Here is a link to all the details on how to qualify for the 2008 Olympics.

http://usashooting.com/modules.php?op=m ... oad&sid=70

I don't see a single thing about "coach's discretion" in the selection procedure for the Olympics, shoot the highest scores when the pressure is on and you will be selected. Seems transparent enough to me.

I can understand coachs having a say when you are picking a development squad, or sending non-performance qualified athletes to World Cups for experience.

[smoking357]

There is absolutely no reason why an ISSF pistol shooter would go anywhere near a red dot.

I agree.

[mikeschroeder]

....
As to dots, I think the Europeans have the right idea. BIG iron sights. American sights are usually very, very small. Marginal for young eyes, terrible for old ones. Go with the big European sights, open the rear sight notch wide, and you will be shocked at how easy it is to shoot iron sights again.

Hi Mike

I have shot the TAU-7 Junior, we bought them for our club. Do those sights count as big European iron sights? They seem bigger than the BOMARs on my 1911. I like those sights.

Other Mike

[Mike McDaniel]

I've not seen a Tau-7, but I expect that the sights are in fact bigger than on most American guns.

[Spencer C]

...Does anyone have anything -preferably constructive- to say?
Richard Newman

This problem is not exclusive to the USA.

Without getting into anybody's personal preferences for the style of shooting sport, here are two components for consideration
- are the organised shooting sports growing (and just the ISSF side in decline for numbers), or is there are general decline in active participants
- what can we learn from other 'growing' sports

Before anyone jumps in and quotes growth figures for the XYZ shooting discipline, any newish shooting discipline will grow spectacularly at first - which of the established disciplines are growing (and how and why)?

The answer/s may not be with the top end shooting bodies, but with the ordinary club member at the range. How often have you heard somebody say words to the effect "that ISSF rubbish is not real shooting, you need to get a real gun and have some fun", or " that Black Powder is just a lot of old fogies covereing themselves with noise, smoke and grease" (see Mike, the BP shooters get rubbished as well)

We cannot force shooters to get into ISSF shooting, but we can encourage / welcome / assist them - the WE is us as individuals.

Regards,
Spencer C

[Fred Mannis]

Iron target sights on U.S. pistols are compromised by the 'need' to have the gun fit into a holster. Even the large Aristocrat sights for PPC revolvers are smaller than the sights on my European target pistols.

[Sparks]

How Your Eye Works
1. Light reflects off an object and enters the visual system through the front of your eye called the cornea.
2. After the light passes through the cornea, it passes through the front chamber of the eye.
3. After the light passes through the front chamber, it passes through the pupil.
4. The iris, the colored part of your eye, regulates the amount of light that passes through your pupil.
5. The light then passes through the lens into the interior chamber of the eye.

So far, not too inaccurate.

6. There, the image passes through the jelly-like fluid called the Vitreous Humor.

As it did in the front chamber of the eye (the aqueous humour)

7. After passing through the Vitreous Humor, the image reaches the Retina, home of the rods and cones that process the image into a format the brain can interpret. This is where the image flips upside down.

No, the image flips as a result of passing through the lens. It's upside down long before hitting the retina ("long before" in terms of photons that is).

8. The retina may or may not send the image to your Optic Nerve and the Optic Nerve finally sends the information to your visual cortex of your brain

Nope.

9. Your brain converts the information from your Optic Nerve into the nerve impulses repesenting a picture of the object you see. You must acknowledge the eye can only focus on an object about 18 to 20 inches from the eye. Of course wide vision can see more but not with any measurable accuracy.

Nope.

Looking at the past medical reports and findings, it is determined that we have one second to fire a rifle or pistol or shotgun before the eyes go blank and the eyes stop seeing any thing external of the eyes themselves. This blanking action is called the Perky effect after research findings by Doctor W.C. Perky, M.D. in 1910.

The "Perky Effect" does technically exist; but it's not quite so clear-cut.
From the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Psychology:

3.3 The Perky Experiment

Titchener's theories, and, to a very large extent, the introspection based experimental methods he used to test and refine them, have long since fallen into disrepute.[4] However, one series of experiments carried out in Titchener's laboratory, by his student C.W. Perky (1910), has achieved something of a classic, even mythic, status in the literature on imagery. Perky asked her subjects to fixate a point on a screen in front of them and to visualize various objects there, such as a tomato, a book, a leaf, a banana, an orange, or a lemon. As the subjects did this, and unbeknownst to them, a faint patch of color, of an appropriate size and shape, and just above the normal threshold of visibility, was back projected (in soft focus) onto the screen. Apart from on a couple of occasions when the projection apparatus was mishandled, none of Perky's subjects (who ranged from a ten year old child to the trained and experienced introspectors of Titchener's laboratory) ever realized that they were experiencing real percepts; they took what they "saw" on the screen to be entirely the products of their imagination. In fact, however, the projections did influence their experiences: some subjects expressed surprise at finding themselves imagining a banana "upright" rather than the horizontally oriented one they had been trying for; one was surprised to wind up imagining an elm leaf after trying for a maple. On the other hand, purely imaginary details were also reported: One subject could "see" the veins of the leaf; another claimed that the title on the imagined book was readable.

It may be very tempting to take Perky's experiment as a clear demonstration that there are no differences in kind between the subjective experiences of perception and imagery. Although perception is usually more vivid (or, as Hume put it, has greater "vivacity") than mental imagery, the experiment appears to show that this is, at best, a mere difference in degree, and cannot guarantee that we will not systematically confuse the two. However, it is notable that the projected color patches in Perky's setup were clearly seen as such by witnesses who were not actively striving to form an image (Perky, 1910). Furthermore, Segal (1971b) reports that her initial attempts to replicate Perky's findings were a failure. Her subjects spontaneously noticed the projected color patches. In order to reproduce "the Perky effect," Segal found it necessary to induce a prior state of relaxation in her subjects (Segal & Nathan, 1964; Segal, 1971b).[5]

In her replication and extension of Perky's work, Segal also tried projecting faint pictures that were quite different from the mental image she had asked her subjects to form. In some cases the relaxed subjects assimilated even this incongruous stimulus into their imagery, and still did not realize that a real visual stimulus was influencing their experience. For example, some subjects were asked to imagine a New York skyline whilst a faint image of a tomato was projected on the screen. Several of them failed to notice the tomato, but reported imagining New York at sunset (Segal, 1972). Nevertheless, Segal concludes from her extensive experimental studies that the Perky effect does not show that mental images and faint percepts are inherently indistinguishable. Rather, the confusion between image and percept seems to occur because the processes involved in forming a mental image of the requested type interfere with the normal utilization of the mechanisms of perception, and raise perceptual detection thresholds (Segal, 1971b; Segal & Fusella, 1971).

In other words, if you're strongly imagining what you want to see, and you then introduce a faint image to the eye, you may not perceive that image as it is projected; but instead see something of a mix between your imagination and the image.

In target shooting, however, we have a brightly-lit image, and we don't stare at it for anywhere near the amount of time that the Perky effect operates in, and we're not in a relaxed state. Citing the Perky Effect isn't valid for us, therefore (not without specific experimentation anyway). There are reasons why staring at the image for more than a few seconds isn't a good one from the point of view of hitting the ten - but they have more to do with overexposing the retinal cells (not to mention wobbling about more as your hold degenerates) than with the Perky Effect.

With this study we are becoming increasingly aware that sighting as we know it is incorrectly accomplished by the traditional methods and we should be looking at other methodologies.

Yes, because we're not seeing anyone shooting 600/600 in air rifle. Or prone 50m rifle. Or 300m rifle. Right?

If you don't comply with this timing you the shooter will not see the target after one second and the remainder of the shooting cycle will be completed in error. All of this is medically proven and correct.
Chet Skinner

Just to recap, no, it is not a medical fact.
In fact, it's been pretty well rebutted by modern research.

For how the eye and visual perception really work, I recommend the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_system

(You work in a Computer Vision research group for seven years, you pick up a thing or two :D )