No but for those who don't have target rifles, offhand is a better test of the rifleman's skill. So are we testing the guns or the shooter? I'll take a pass on this one.
Well you, after all, would know your abilities better than I. I like to shoot, win, loose or draw is irrelevant. I travel very long distances to shoot matches that I KNOW I can never win but I love the sport. A ML match where I live is 100+ miles one way. I do pretty well most times.
If you cannot shoot a group from a rest how can you shoot one standing? A person does not even need a zero for 50 yards for this. Shoot a shot or two at a piece of paper with your aiming point and just put the aiming point at a place on a score target where the sight picture will put the ball in the middle. But then a rifleman should know where his rifle shoots.
But then silly me, I thought this was about TRADITIONAL MLs so I cooked up something at least SOMEWHAT like what was shot back in the day. Where rest matches were the NORM. Off hand matches did not become popular until well into the percussion era when Schuetzen became a big money game in the US. The “chunk match” match never really died out in America. At least nit until after WW-I.
Hunting? I almost never shoot offhand at an animal if I can avoid it. I have done it a few times, range short and no way to do anything else since the critter had “made” me. But I really like prone or a rest.
And I dislike luck matches.
BTW an actual quote by Rev. Doddridge speaking of the frontier 1763-1783, reads “..The present mode of shooting off hand was not then in practice. This mode was not considered as any trial of a gun, nor indeed, as much of a test of the skill of a marksmen”.
Now I seem to remember the “poor test of a rifle” from somewhere but this is the one I have bookmarked in LaCrosse’s “The Frontier Rifleman”. It basically says the same thing with more verbage. It might be in “Colonial Riflemen in The American Revolution”. Or I somehow “translated” Doddridge.
And with the lock time of a flintlock its nearly impossible to shot group as small standing as I can with a BPCR with its slow lock time.
Then….
So do you consider a 54 Kibler Colonial a “target rifle? Yeah it was shooting too high. So I put on a taller front sight.
With the proper aiming point it would do pretty well as it was on the target shown in my first post.
ITS A RIFLE MATCH. Rifles are supposed to shoot small groups.
But then America has always been populated with gun owners, shooters and riflemen. The first generally knows where the bullet comes out, the second can hit what he is shooting at if its big enough. The rifleman is more competent. He is the guy at Second Saratoga that shot Burgoyne's cannoneers off their guns, who killed British officers (General Frazier at 300 yards) and drove the British scouts back to Canada. Won at King’s Mountain and quite a few others as well. I try to be a rifleman, not just a gun owner.
