Taking On Coronavirus!

You are stuck at home. It doesn’t matter if it is due to a quarantine, a “shelter in place” order, or your employer has mandated it. While normally you might go to the range once a week or so, that’s out for the most part.

So what can you do? Well, make the coronavirus work for you!

Use some of the time to practice your draw, your trigger stroke, and/or your grip and use coronavirus to do it! As you can see above, I have a target that was provided by Claude Werner, the Tactical Professor himself, set up in my kitchen. The link for it is here.

If I stand on the other side of the kitchen table, I’m just about 4 yards away which is the scale this target uses. You see the numbers on it? They stand for how far away the 8 inch target would appear at 7, 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards respectively. You can use a SIRT pistol or really any UNLOADED firearm. Claude has some safety rules you should follow when dry fire practicing and you can read them here.

The original target was created by Hilton Yam of 10-8 Performance. Claude just modified it to add the coronavirus instead of black circles.

The bottom line is you can work on your skills, have some fun, and get back at that damn Wuhan coronavirus (aka Kung Flu aka COVID-19 aka China virus).

Practice For When Ammo Is In Short Supply

When ammo is in short supply or rising in cost, many people don’t get in the practice that they need to stay proficient with their handguns. This new video from the National Shooting Sports Foundation discusses an alternative – dry-firing. Charlie McNeese of Gunsite Academy discusses the many important skills that you can hone with dry-fire practice at home. These include trigger control and reset, your presentation and draw, and magazine reloads. Some of these skills are hard to practice at public ranges as they often prohibit things like drawing from a holster or speed reloads.

Sheriff Jim On Dry-Fire Practice

I don’t think there is any question about how much dry-fire practice can help improve your shooting skills. In this video, Sheriff Jim Wilson talks about how to do it safely.

The ballistic pad that Sheriff Jim uses can be found here. One alternative to using a pad like this is doing your practice facing an outside wall of your house which has a backstop beyond it. By backstop, I mean a hill or retaining wall and not a wooden fence.