Competitive Shooting
Competitive shooting is probably one of the best ways to improve your shooting skills. It encourages regular practice, focusing upon areas of weakness, developing technique and ultimately improving your score.
The club runs a wide range of competitions throughout the shooting season and is keen for members to participate.
Shooting Disciplines:
Benchrest
Benchrest is a discipline where high precision rifles are shot at paper targets. The rifles ride on a front and rear rest, which sits on a table or bench.
Benchrest shooters are notoriously detail-oriented and choose to hand-load their own ammunition. This fine-tunes the load to their rifle’s chamber, action and barrel.
Civilian Service Rifle
Civilian Service Rifle matches are typically shot between 100 and 500 yards. Most matches consist of deliberate, rapid fire and snap shooting practices, including movement between distances and different shooting positions.
There are four classes of rifle:
- Historic
- Any Iron
- Service Optic
- Practical Optic
Gallery Rifle and Pistol
Gallery rifle and pistol discipline events are shot at short and medium distances. Many of the events are classified, so competitors shoot against others of similar ability. The majority of events are shot between 10m and 50m, with a few going out to 100m.
There are four types of firearm:
- Semi-auto .22 Rifle
- Lever-action Rifle
- Long-barreled Pistol
- Long-barreled Revolver
Muzzle Loading
Muzzle Loading rifles and pistols are potentially as accurate as their modern counterparts, though their rate of fire is much slower. Most muzzle loading rifles (other than those using spherical balls) are accurate up to 600 yards. For the long range specialist, rifles in .451″ calibre shoot well out to 1,000 yards.
Practical Shotgun
Practical Shotgun (PSG) is a discipline where shooters engage metal, frangible and paper targets using section 2 (3 shot) or section 1 (3+ shot) shotguns, with a variety of ammunition whilst moving. It is based on Practical Pistol and the stages are very similar in design and scoring.
Small-bore Target Rifle
Small-bore target rifle is a discipline where .22 calibre target rifles firing .22 rimfire ammunition are fired at paper or cardboard targets, distances are typically 15 to 100 yards. The practical skills involved are very similar to those used for both full-bore and air rifle shooting.