One of the most common excuses heard on the line and online will always be “it’s the gun!” And for as many times as that phrase is repeated, there are an equal number of “no it’s not!” responses. The reason is obvious. Going to the range and expecting to be better than you’ve ever been before without putting in the requisite practice usually leads to disappointment.
Having said that, though… sometimes, it really is the gun.
Two examples come immediately to mind. A couple years back, a very eager and serious student came to one of my classes with her new M&P9 Compact. For two days we worked to figure out why she was shooting so high. We worked on her grip, her trigger manipulation, I even went through the most basic drills to make sure she understood proper sight alignment. It wasn’t until the end of class that I actually took the gun and shot it myself. Results? It was shooting more than a foot high at 25yd. Both the student and I were both so ready to believe she was the problem that we never considered the gun as the real culprit. Obviously, I gave her a refund on the class and I’m lucky she was too nice to flood the internet with complaints about the time and ammo she wasted for a weekend trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist.
More recently, a buddy and sometimes student of mine started shooting a custom 1911 that he’d mothballed for a while. The gun came from the custom shop with some trigger problems which were fixed in the field by another instructor during a class. This shooter, who we’ll call Vinnie, found himself struggling to perform to his normal standards with the gun. We talked about various potential problems related to switching to and from the 1911/single-action platform when he casually mentioned that the gun now has a nine pound trigger pull. On a short, hard break 1911 trigger? If Rob Leatham and Jeff Cooper had a baby, it couldn’t shoot that 1911 well. And not just because it would be a half-zombie freak of nature born to two men, either. (the baby, not the 1911)
Don’t assume the problem is the gun… but at the same time, don’t smash your head against a wall trying to make a Ferrari out of an anvil. If you cannot fix it on your own, put the gun in the hands of the most competent person you know with experience running that type of gun seriously and have him take it for a spin. If he’s having similar problems, it might be time to call the warranty center.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
My wife kept telling me over and over how her XD wasn’t accurate on longer shots. I went through many of the same troubles until I actually shot the gun at 25 yards and saw that it was about 7 inches high. Just makes me think that you gotta try everything!
Good post. Whenever someone is having problems with a firearm, the first thing I recommend is getting a known good shooter to fire the weapon in order to verify whether the problem is shooter induced or is truly a hardware issue.
I went through the LE academy in 1977 with a fixed sight bull barrel S&W revolver. I’m a lefty so when all my shots were grouping low right the instructors said yep, typical for a left hand shooter. I knew better because I didn’t do that with other guns. After a few days of trigger control, sight alignment, breathing, blah, blah, blah, I handed the gun to the instructor and said here, you do it. What do you know. All his shot were low and to the right. Now as an instructor at the academy one of the first things I do when a student says it’s the gun, I’ll shoot it while they watch although I’m always confident that with our academy guns that it isn’t the gun. At the very least it removes the student’s doubt about the gun.
I think that Ken’s point about removing doubt is an important one here. One of the problems of being at a lower level of skill is that you *know* you are inconsistent and you *know* you are doing something things wrong – but you don’t know what. Having someone verify for you that the problem is you takes a real load of uncertainty off of your mind.
Heck, it could turn out to be both the gun and how you are using the gun. It took me ages to realize that my 25 yard groups were nowhere near the bull because the gun was sighted in for a target hold, which I was not expecting. My group was just big enough at that range that I didn’t trust that I wasn’t just pulling them. I adjusted my point of aim, and suddenly the same so-so grouping looked a lot more reasonable when it was hitting opposite sides of the 9 and 8 rings, with the pulled shots going to the edge of the paper instead of God-only-knows where.
It has helped me incredibly several times to hand a gun/ammo combination to someone I know knows what they are doing, just so that I *know* that the problem is me instead of spending the whole session wondering.
Heck, sometimes it’s both! My buddy was shooting a new M&P 9 a year ago and the front sight was slightly left of centre. Now since his skill and fundamentals at the time were not yet refined as they are now, there wasn’t enough consistency to really tell anything was really wrong.
It wasn’t until he started mastering the basics (coupled with the front sight continuing to drift left every so slowly) that we noticed an issue with the gun. We finally realized when I shot “Dot Torture” with his gun and started producing neat groups that were slightly right of the circles.
Always check the students gun.I had a fellow officer who was shooting all his shots in a tight group but a ways away from his point of aim. A quick check of his gun prior to adminersting all types of diagnostics drills showed his rear sight was tweaked. A quick sight adjustment and he was back on target.
I’m always a fan of the whole “its the indian not the arrow” saying. That being said, if the arrow is warped or cracked or missing fletching, it doesn’t matter how skilled the operator (thats right I said operator) is. A great gun doesn’t make a bad shooter good, but a bad gun can make a good shooter average or worse.
Yeah, remember the S&W 627?
I really could have swore that was me being out of practice.
Still working that thing over to see if it is worth saving, or if I turn it into a paperweight.
Sean — That’s another great example. I think if Horace & Daniel themselves came down from heaven to tell you that gun was screwed up you still would have been blaming yourself! 8)
And sometimes, as I’ve discovered, it’s not me or the gun, but the ammo. I feel like quality control of cheap training ammo has degraded in the last several years.
As previously mentioned on your awesome web site, my student with the compact .40 had (as did I) with that firearm, not the basics. And I agree with Norman, fairly often the ammo sucks. I zero with the good stuff, but cheap practice ammo can give bizarre results.
Nice comments. Yep, once in a while a good instructor will get egg on his face insisting the shooter is doing it all wrong, only to find out it is the gun. Pays to listen to your humble side and prove it is not the gun to the shooter. It will then help them focus on pure techniques and not blame the gun.
Can’t tell you how many times we took guns from officers and saw they had knocked their sights around jumping fences and things. Nothing is permanent on the gun, so ruling it out is only wise to do.
If someone groups tightly but way off POA, it’s such a simple test to sandbag the handgun and tell for certain whether it’s the gun or the shooter. I don’t understand why it’s always such a long-term mystery.
Having spent a long time exorcising myself of a flinch I picked up by just going out and shooting to shoot, I am always one of the guys shouting “no it’s not!” If I’m shooting with a friend and they blame the gun, I’ll take it from them and prove them wrong. I guess it’s a good habit – it lets me shoot more (plus) and it let’s me make sure it really *isn’t* the gun.
That being said, I had an experience like this myself recently with my first Glock, a G21. I was trying to engage 6″ steel targets at 25 yards offhand and I was missing quite more than I was comfortable with. Luckily, my gunsmith (whose range I was shooting at) provided me with his personal and nearly identical G21, with which I was making all of my hits.
Turns out my particular G21 must have been zeroed for 100M or some crazy distance, because when I fired it off a rest at a paper target I found it to be about 3.5″ high at 25 yards and 6″ high at 50 yards, with decent groups – the 25 yard group was about 3″ which is about the limit of my skill with factory Glock sights.
This was swiftly corrected thanks to a set of AmeriGlo sights, which I had planned on purchasing anyway. I used their calculator and figured out the front sight height I needed to get to just about dead-on at 25, and it worked like a charm.