#bench shooting

[gunfm]

How to Boost Your Benchrest Shooting Skills

How to Boost Your Benchrest Shooting Skills

How to Boost Your Benchrest Shooting Skills | RifleShooter.

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[kathryn-sander]

Dad gets the same security guard once a year for his school’s year 10 formal. Big burley fellow. Ex special forces and still in the army reserves. Dad was talking to him one night and they got to chatting about one of the guy’s favourite subjects, guns. He was telling Dad a story about snipers in the army or something like that. Dad casually mentioned that our cousin was a champion long range bench shooter in the US. The guy said that he knew all about that, had done it himself and read about it and kept up with it on the internet. He asked who our cousin was and Dad said, "Mike Bower". Aghast, he said, "You know Mike Bower!?" He was very, very impressed (remember this is in Australia and Mike lives in Williamsport, PA). Dad didn't ask how he knew about Mike but he seemed to think very highly of his reputation. My cousin Mike is a man of many hobbies. He once went through a long stint of making his own fruit wines in his basement, he is an avid fisher, he has a knack for photography and loves to make as much food from scratch as possible, and I’m not just talking baking bread here, he makes his own mozzarella and ricotta cheese, mixes his own spices and smokes his own salmon with birch wood he chops down on the Bower farm. What we claim to be Mike’s greatest talents, however, and one of the more obscure interests we like to tell our friends back home when speaking of our cousin in the US is his status as a champion long range bench shooter. Mike competes ten times per year with both light and heavy guns which are of different calibre and muzzle velocity. He builds his own guns and loads his own shells. Long ranch shooting we’re talking about is firing at targets at an exact range of 1000 yards (just under one kilometre). From this distant he can put ten shots into a 7 inch (about 18 cm) circle. If he can get that down to 5 inches, he will have the world record.

He won the world championship in a season a few years ago, but he didn't get a world record. Mike has taken to following my blog and I told him that when he shot a world record I would write a post just for him. Well I’m still waiting for the phone call with news of a record but when it happens I’m going to tell everyone that I shot a bullet from the gun that shot a world record. I didn’t shoot it very well and it scared me to death but I did it. Mike is modest about his shooting. He never wears shirts with any writing, images or logos on them so when he’s given a shirt for placing highly, he won’t wear it. He showed us the scopes and other prizes valued in the thousands that he’s won and they still sit sealed in their boxes. Mike used to hunt deer just like the majority of males living in Williamsport. He doesn’t anymore. I think maybe Mike finds that hunting is no longer a challenge. Not when you can lure the white-tail deer to a desired position with food for a couple weeks leading up to hunting season then sit and wait and the day hunting season opens shoot them when they come in for a feed. You can feed them salt licks (easily bought from your local Wal-Mart along with deer attractants, bullets, hunting knives, and every sort of hunting license) to acquire a tastier meat and we’ve even been told stories by others of placing steroids in the feed to yield a greater rack that can then be shown to your friends to prove how cool you are. He also realises that the deer population within Pennsylvania is diminishing at such a rate that the current level of licensing from the game commission is not sustainable for the deer population. I particularly liked Mike’s theory that the white-tail deer population was decreasing in Pennsylvania because the insurance companies, which don’t like paying out the high quantity of compensation claims resulting from car accidents at the hand of pesky jumping deer, had partnered with research teams at Universities to create a deer steriliser to be spread across Pennsylvanian forests. Or that the employees at the gaming commission are selling increasing quantities of licenses as a means of funding fancy car purchases which are then driven around town. I like to think that the deer have simply cottoned on and are heading north away from hunting Pennsylvanians and towards New York State which in recent years has seen a dramatic increase in the deer population. In many areas of the United States however, white-tailed deer flourish because of the lack of natural predators and the abundance of deer-friendly habitat and thus the species is often at the centre of the hunting debate. My favourite pro-hunting argument is the idea of managing the deer population since natural deer predators have been eliminated in many areas. Hunters argue that hunting is necessary to perform the function of wolves or cougars in keeping the deer population in check. I guess hunting had nothing to do with the low wolf and cougar population though. Opponents of hunting will argue that hunting does not reduce the deer population because removing some individuals from the population results in more food per deer, which leads to the births of more twins and triplets and that if the deer population needs to be further reduced, immunocontraception can be used which would lay evidence to Mike’s insurance company theory. The only input I have into the debate is based on Bambi’s mother being killed and my obsession with deer since they turned up on my door step in Wollongong. That said, I haven’t met a person since being in the States who hunts and doesn’t eat every last piece of meat from their catch. My Dad grew up in Williamsport on venison and he won’t touch it now. These days Mike lures the white-tail deer in with food, not to kill them, but to photograph them. He has started to talk to his friends about hunting and the need to protect the deer population in Pennsylvania even though he hates when they eat the corn crops on his farm. As easy as it is to do at times, my cousin Mike makes it difficult to stereotype Americans.