How to Stop Missing with a Rifle

Buck fever isn’t the only reason hunters miss. Hitting a wild animal in just the right spot when you have only seconds to make it happen isn’t easy. Most of us also don’t practice in the offseason, which, for anything else as hard as shooting, would be crazy. Here’s a bit on everything you don’t want to do before pulling the trigger, and a few things you can do to fix your shooting.

In most cases, you can’t blame the gun for your misses, but it pays to look a little deeper into what you’re toting in the woods. I once worked in a gun shop and saw customer rifles with everything from scopes mounted with only one scope ring to rifles with badly rusted bores to old shotguns with so much drop in the stock a shooter couldn’t see over the barrels. To my surprise, a lot of people would actually take these guns hunting.

A hunting rifle or shotgun needs to work unfailingly. For rifles, use the best scope you can afford, mount it properly with rings torqued to the proper specs, and make sure the bore and muzzle aren’t damaged. If you don’t know what any of the above means, go to a gun shop or find a shooter who does and learn.

If you can’t get steady behind a rifle, you’re not going to always hit your target. It’s really that simple. You might get lucky and hit it sometimes, but why settle for only sometimes?

Let’s take off-hand shooting and unsupported shooting out of the equation for a minute. The majority of hunters would have a hard time hitting an 8-inch plate at 100 yards from an offhand position, which is why a lot of us bring tripods and bipods into the woods. It’s also why hunters and experienced rifle shooters will look for support in the field in the form of rocks, trees, and mounds of dirt.

Shooting from a support like a tripod, or even a bipod, won’t magically perfect your marksmanship, though. You need to know when you’re not steady and know how to adjust to become steadier before shooting. The best way to see this is in your reticle. Is it waving around on target? Is it moving so much that it’s leaving the edges of your target? If it does this even for a second, you’re likely to miss. Your reticle will almost always move a little, but good shooters know when it’s wobbling around too much. If it is, you need to do more to construct a stable shooting position.

Think of shooting a rifle from a supported position as a series of inputs and outputs. The more pressure you put on your rifle to hold it on target, the more input. The output of this action will be a wobbly rifle, because our muscles are notoriously unreliable at keeping things steady. Input less on the rifle, and it will shake less.

The trick is to put just enough pressure on the rifle to steady it and absorb recoil without wobbling it. Play around with this at home with an empty rifle and the supports you’ll use in the field to shoot. Put a ½-inch dot on the wall and steady your crosshair within that dot before dry firing. If you can master this, you’re on your way to missing less.

Your natural point of aim is where your rifle wants to point whenever you’re in a given shooting position. Many shooters will get into a position, then muscle their rifle on target. If you do this, you’ll notice right away that your crosshairs are all over the place, moving side to side, even if you’re in the prone position.

To find your natural point of aim, get in position with the gun pointed downrange. Then close your eyes and relax into the most steady position you can. Open your eyes and notice where your rifle is pointing. If it isn’t pointing at the target, you need to adjust your whole body, not the rifle, to get it there. Adjust your body, repeat the process, and find the position you can be most relaxed in to take your shot. As you practice this more, you’ll get to a natural point of aim more quickly. Just remember to move your body and not the rifle to steady the crosshairs.

In my opinion, there is little reason to carry anything bigger than a .30-06 for big game at practical hunting distances (under 400 yards). Even at a distance, some of the bigger, badder cartridges don’t offer much more in “killing power.” What they do produce are foot-pounds of recoil, which will make you a worse shooter.

In anticipation of recoil, we death grip our rifles to make the hurt less hurtful. Recoil will also make you flinch, no matter how tough you are. To test this, a colleague and I took a 7mm PRC and shot several groups on paper from a bench at 100 yards. Then we put a muzzle brake on the same rifle and shot it again. The recoil was cut in half, and so were our group sizes. All of our groups would kill at 100 yards, but stretched out over distance, the recoil could drop your chances of hitting an animal where it counts.

Big cartridges were really in vogue when rifle bullets sucked. Bullets are better now, and you can get away with lighter kicking rifles. But if you’re still married to the magnums, there’s good news. You can use a suppressor or muzzle brake to take out some of the recoil, making these guns much easier to shoot.

The big thing in rifles today is big optics for long-range shooting. These optics usually come with an adjustable parallax, sometimes called a focus knob. It’s a lot to explain exactly what parallax is here. Just know that when it’s off, it can affect your sight picture, causing your crosshair to actually be off target. You could trust the little yardage numbers on your parallax knob, but that would be a mistake. They’re often incorrect.

To check parallax, sit behind your rifle and steady it in a position where it can’t move. Then wobble your head side to side while looking through the scope. If the crosshair moves on target, your parallax is off. Keep adjusting the wheel slowly until you can move your head, and the crosshair will stay on target. Then pull the trigger.