6-21-2023 Range Day

 

The range trip today involved the “intermediate” rifle in my course development for a Designated Marksman Course – the Ruger American Predator in .223.  I don’t consider a .223 large enough to fill a DM role, but it works fine to introduce the concept of recoil mitigation since the .22LR trainers simply have no recoil.  That said, when you move to this platform the goals of precision and accuracy remain . . . 2MOA regardless of the distance and all rounds within a 2” circle at 50 yards and a 3” circle at 100 yards.

 

At 50 yards I reduced the round count to 3-rounds per target and fired a total of 60 rounds.  I dropped 1 round for an average accuracy of 98.3%.  And I had an average group size for 20ea 3-round groups of 1.67 MOA.  Well within my desired accuracy of 90% and my average group size of 2MOA.

 

Just a side note, I was shooting Frontier 75gr Hornady BTHP Match bullets.  A characteristic I’ve noted in the past carried through to this session, I had 2 Failure to Fire malfunctions for the 60 rounds.  Honestly, with today’s ammunition, this is unusual.  These were the last few boxes of my stock and I’ve moved on to PMC X-TAC as a replacement.

 

Moving out to 100 yards, things did open up.  Sheet #1, Target #1 was to check zero so not counted in my average.  For 45 rounds, my average group size opened to 2.26 MOA.  However, my dropped shots increased to 6 out of 45 for an average of 86.6%.  So, I was “out of spec” for both precision and accuracy.  Heavy sigh.  I’m going to go back today and shoot the 100-Yards with the PMC X-TAC and see if things snug up.

 

Regardless, a fine time was had despite it being pretty darn hot in the low 90s.  Keep shooting, take the time to do some self-evaluation and then fix all the little things that keep you from being the shooter you want to be!