If you’ve struggled with shooting your center-fire pistol accurately, one of the best ways to improve that is by going down in caliber, to rimfire.

Two factors can affect your ability to shoot accurately: noise and recoil. And with center-fire you deal with both of them. As for noise, any loud noise is going to disturb us. It is going to create a natural flinch response. And that means we are going to see that on the target. In center-fire you obviously deal with a bit more recoil, and your anticipation of that recoil is going to affect how the shots end up on the target. But when you transition to .22, you have a lot less to deal with. It's softer in sound and it recoils much less. So let’s get out that .22.

Now right off the bat, you can tell a difference between the M&P .45 and this .22 Victory, and you can eliminate the noise and recoil factors in order to shoot more accurately. So, here’s a drill you can use to practice shooting your .22 pistol.

I have set a target at a comfortable distance and I am going to focus on the basic fundamentals of shooting. It’s a blank target. I have no aiming point and for the first shot of this drill I am going to focus on having the perfect sight picture.

I’m going to maintain that sight picture while I press the trigger straight back towards my nose.  

The goal of that shot is to get that perfect sight picture, and the perfect trigger squeeze.

Now, that first shot will be our aiming point for our next series of shots. And the goal here is to shoot as tight a group as possible while aiming on the target and slowly squeezing the trigger to the rear.

Now, it’s time to analyze our group. You’ll notice that not every shot is piled up on top of each other. You may need to make an adjustment in your sights.

The most important thing in doing this drill is accepting that sight picture, squeezing that trigger, and having a great shot process.

Now one of these shots has dipped a bit low, but the others are in a nice tight group. That means I faltered a little - I changed something. And that is where this drill is great because you can identify areas for improvement.

Rinse, repeat, and when you are comfortable enough with the .22, transition to your center-fire gun. You want to keep all of those principles in place, seeing that perfect sight picture, working that trigger so you can be more accurate no matter the caliber. Until next time, be safe and have fun.

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