Skeet/trap questions??

I did it once when I was a kid. It was fun. But I certainly don't know much about it. I've also seen some professionals doing it. Holy crap are they fast.

They're not faster than you or I... What's happening is that experience is letting them pull triggers the first instant they ever see the lead they want on a target and, basically other than for the targets coming towards you, you want to shoot them as quickly as possible. Hit rates do not go up as the target gets further away...

The question I might have had if anybody here knew anything more about this business than I do would be about whatever REASON there might be for different people seeing leads differently.

i prefer catch and release skeet shooting



no guns, easier on the ears, and really why shoot skeets, you can't eat them, let them roam free

When I said they were fast, I meant that they were fast AND accurate, not that they are physiologically any different from you or I.

I don't know. Natural eye/hand coordination perhaps, or quicker eye movement?

In tennis, some players are notoriously better at having quick reactions. This may be partially due to practice and experience, but it probably also has a physiological component as well.

What Rosborne said. The easiest answer is, It's a gift. I know that's a cop-out but how do you explain any athletic skill that's above the commonplace? It's a gift, a talent.

Shotgun sports are by far the most intriguing of all gun sports. Using a shotgun properly is an art form and, like tennis or baseball, using a shotgun is a pure hand/eye thing and the analogies are all with baseball or tennis, there is no analogy to any other shooting sport. Like tennis or baseball, you watch the target 100 percent; if you ever watch any part of a shotgun, you'll never hit anything with it. That sound simple, but is VERY hard to get used to if you're used to any other sort of weapon. Particularly in the case of skeets in which you track targets over a considerable distance, the use of legs and hips is entirely similar to that in baseball or tennis.

There are several kinds of shotgun games, skeet and trap being the two most basic. The best starting point for trying to figure this stuff out aside from basic lessons is going to be www.sunriseproductions.us, particularly Todd Bender's skeet DVD. Some of those tutorial DVDs are a bit pricey, going for around $55, but that one in particular is a basic ticket of admission.

I share Bender's opinion that you have to shoot with a constant lead to have any chance in actual skeet competition. For purposes of hunting with a shotgun you need to be able to swing through and/or pull off of targets as well, in other words a hunter has to have some prowess at all three basic methods of shooting moving targets.

This really is good shooting but it's not as overwhelmingly difficult as it looks since those targets are pretty much in the same place i.e. the whole thing doesn't really involve much gun movement. The big trick is manufacturing a semiauto gun which can cycle that fast, newer ones can, those of 30 years ago or so can't.

Other than that he's using a Benelli gun with a weak spring, the normal Benelli semiauto can't cycle target shells easily and I've watched guys going nuts trying to shoot skeets with them. The Beretta version of the same sort of gun is a vastly better bargain, less expensive and more technologically sophisticated, and can shooot light target shells one day and geese the next without changing anything more than the ammo.

Again the basic question which nobody I talk to knows an answer to: what causes different people to see the crossing shot leads differently. Bender and other experts talk about three and four foot leads and I'd be missing in front of those targets all day long even at three feet and even with skeet (wide) chokes; the crossing shot leads I see are more like about 14 inches and two feet.

I wonder if it depends on how wide your eyes are apart. I'm thinking depth of perception. I imagine reaction times make a difference as well. If my reaction time is 50th of a second slower than yours I need to lead more than you.
Most sports rely on muscle memory in some manner. Thats why practice makes perfect. once you get it right it's mostly a matter of training your body to move or do a certain thing a certain way at a certain time.

I don't see how distance between eyes could have anything to do with it. Granted most people shoot shotguns with both eyes open, nonetheless you sight along the top of the gun and you can only do that with your dominant eye.

I used to do sport clays after I took up rabbit shooting and pheasant shooting as a kid. I learned very early that there is a three point conversion of your eyes, the target, and the tip of the gun.
When I learned to hit the rabbit without ever bringing the gun to my eye (its a time waster), I was hitting almost 100% of myshots. Sport Clays would sometimes be loaded in a slinger that would fling the clay toward you. That was actually a harder shot for me and Id often lead the sucker too long so that someone would fire the next clay before I hit the last one.

I quit all that in high school and that was maybe 35 years ago.
I still like rabbit hunting with light shot (7 or 8) cause it takes a dead on shot to stop them with lighter loads 28 or 410 gage. AND, rabbits are better eating than clay pigeons.

My father tried to get me to accept that "dominant eye" stuff. to thios day I have never brought the gun up to actually aim, I "feel" my way to the target.

Shotguns are a fairly new hobby with me. Most of the hunting I ever do is with bows but I was having hips repaired two years ago and to avoid the temptation of being in a tree with a bow in my hands between the two hip operations I'd made a project out of shotguns. Shotguns were something I'd felt stupid about forever and most of what you see at one of the places I practice archery is people shooting shotguns...

At any rate what I think you're talking about likely involves the other big mystery of the thing to my thinking which is a question of styles of shooting. The way most people shoot for clay pigeon sports is to sight along the top of the gun, that is to find a gun which fits well enough that when you get your cheek down on the stock you naturally see along that top bar of the gun, get used to pointing the thing at different objects by watching the objects and not the gun (which only sounds simple), and then view the thing as a hand/eye game similar to baseball or tennis.

The other mystery says that I'm about 6-3 and there are a certain number of the shotguns I ever pick up which I can't even see over the hump of and couldn't possibly shoot the way I just described, and those guns are either built for people 7' tall and on up, or for some other style of shooting, and there's no way to believe that Beretta for instance makes a third or so of its guns for people over 7' tall. I suspect that those guns with the drop to comb much over 1.5" are for whatever you're doing.