Hello all,

I have been to the range a bunch of times but have never really practiced grouping. To be honest, I normally fire away at distances that range from 10 to 30 feet (small indoor range).

What should i be doing to practice grouping? Is there a specific distance? Help a n00b.

"Grouping" is relative to the purpose of the shooting.
1. If you are trying to check the POI of the gun/ammunition, fire from a rest at the distance you wish to check (e.g. 10 yds) at a visible aiming point (such as a paper target used for Bullseye), resting your hands and operating the trigger without moving the gun. You should get a visible group, the size depending on the gun/ammunition and your skill.


2. If you are trying to check how well you are doing "firing away" at 30 feet, aim at you mark, and measure the diameter of the pattern left by the bullet holes. For defensive use, a paper plate is considered an appropriate standard for the max spread of the shots.
A good grip and trigger control are important skills in achieving desired "grouping".

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Science plus Art

IMO, start close.

Back up the target to 3 yards. Use a target of reasonable size--3-4" is good for beginners. What you want is a target and distance you cannot miss. Proceed to fire slowly. That means one raise, one shot, rest the pistol on the bench, and repeat. Focus on the fundamentals--grip, trigger, sigh alignment.

The purpose is that you have no excuses for missing--you can't blame the ammo, the gun, or the sights.

When you master that, back it up to 7 yards, then 10, then (depending on your abilities and the gun) 17.

I would also suggest that this is primarily for defending at a distance and general marksmanship. Putting two shots through the same hole on a threat is rather pointless. One, because the thing you're going to be shooting at will not be standing still--it'll be bouncing around unpredictably. Two, the second shot in the same wound channel doesn't do much additional damage. So itsy-bitsy groups on paper, while impressive and a good indication of trigger control and sight picture abilities, is not of as much practical use.

Instead, I would focus on basic operation and manipulation, followed by the ability to draw and present smoothly, and then the ability to deliver timely shots on a 6"-8" target at varying ranges. Five shots in five seconds on such a target at 7 yards is far more useful than five shots through the same hole in 20 seconds.

Make no mistake, delivering rounds with great accuracy is a useful skill, and just generally good for building skills. But it's not the ultimate goal.

Grouping is primarily a measure of the inherent accuracy of your gun.

Groups at 25 yards are the standard for this purpose.

Once you establish that your gun is reasonably inherently accurate, grouping is useful for sight adjustment.

Adjusting sights on a gun that won't group at 25 yards (or that you can't shoot well enough to group) is a fool's errand.

Your pistol should be able to shoot 4' groups at 25 yards.

Shooting slow fire at 3 yards you should be creating a single ragged hole for a group.

If you aren't, your shooting skill is suspect.

If the purpose of your handgun is self defense and you take a shot at twenty-five yards, I think you had better have really excellent legal representation immediately available. Except in extremely unusual circumstances I suspect you would have a lot of trouble justifying shooting an assailant seventy-five feet away.

That's not to discourage testing the accuracy of your gun, at twenty-five yards or six feet, and of course handgun hunting is a different matter. Just thinking about how you plan to use the gun and what that may entail.

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Oh well, what the hell.

People get hung up on distance. You might remember that for a long time, police were often criticized for shooting melee-armed combatants who were out of arm's reach--as close as ten feet.

Then the Tueller test was developed and researched, and it was found that a gap of seven yards could be closed in 1.5 seconds or less. Ayoob continued researching and documenting Tueller times, and found that physical condition didn't matter too much because the short amount of effort required was anaerobic. Overweight guys could do it in 1.5 seconds. As could asthmatics, the tubercular, the elderly, the wheelchair-bound, and even guys with a broken leg in a cast. A man named Larry Anderson suffered a spiral fracture of the tibia and the femur at the start of a Tueller test, and ran it out anyway. He's got pins in his leg, and now we know that you can break both bones in a leg and still close a 7-yard gap in 1.4 seconds.

So now, if you shoot an asthmatic coal miner with a broken leg and a tire iron in a rain-slick parking lot, and get charged, Mas can flip open a binder and point out that an asthmatic with a broken leg completed the Tueller test in 1.4 seconds in those exact conditions. And you, if you're a smart bunny, can articulate why you shot.

The Tueller Principle is not that an attacker must be no further than 21 feet before you start shooting, as it's often misinterpreted. This is the exact opposite of what the test intended to show.

The point is that a melee-armed attacker can close deceptively large distances in critically short amounts of time. There is, in fact, no hard-and-fast "you must be this close to shoot" line. At attacker charging from 25 yards will take, at most, about 4.5 seconds. Possibly a lot less because they'll be spending a greater portion of the time at full speed compared to the shorter 7-yard run. Sounds pretty 'immediate' to me.

Thus, what's important is that the decision to shoot fulfills the requirements for deadly force, and whether you have a reasonable opportunity to retreat, not that they're "close-enough".

On retreat, I've often heard it said that if such an attacker is that far away, that you can simply turn and run. My response has always been that it amounts to betting your life on a foot race--and one where your attacker has a head start! After all, he's already approaching. By turning, you place your back to the threat, putting you in a terrible position. If you find yourself losing the race, now you have to stop, turn, and engage a threat that's already moving at you at full speed.

Hence, I suggest that retreat (which is legally-required in public in many states) is only viable if it is as immediate as the threat. In other words, opening a car door and getting in could potentially work (although even that takes a disturbing amount of time), or retreating inside a building you can lock.

Running, however, is not desirable.

And, of course, if your attacker has a firearm, then distance is simply a non-issue. He's an immediate and imminent threat.

I'm glad you brought that up. I often hear conversations of being able to shoot out to 25 yds with tight groupings and in my head I'm thinking 'If you're using this gun for SD, how in the world will you be able to justify shooting someone from that distance?' I think it can be fun for competition and switching up drills for the range, but I'd rather be proficient from 10 yds in.

If you can draw from concealment at 7 yards and hit a 6 inch paper pie plate in 1 second EVERYTIME...Don't worry about your defense gun's ability to group. I have a dozen men who can do this regularly, another bunch in the 1.5 range. This info is only for self defense. It is great fun to shoot small groups a different ranges, but other than helping you with motor memory skills and sight alignment-trigger press it won't necessarily get you back home safe. I have " 2700" shooters here that can shoot knots at 25 yards and aren't worth beans inside 7.
Bill Jordon said years ago, the difference in a man that can draw and shoot and hit in 1/2 second and a man that takes 1 second is, you now have 2 holes to dig.

I must disagree with a lot of what is posted here, but I suppose there are several ways to look at this. The aspect we should all be concerned with is developing shooting skills and we do that with a lot of practice.

Internet legal experts and gunfighting theorists aside, shooting groups offhand at 25 yards will tell one far more about skills and technique, or lack of same than will shooting up close. At a few yards, most poor shooters with sorry ammunition will usually shoot small groups. A shooter gains nothing by practicing at such distances, except verifying point-of-impact vs. point-of-aim. This needs doing once if you always use the same ammunition.

Shooting up close hides our shortcomings, and those may be many. Shooting at distance blatantly exposes those shortcomings so that we know what to work on. Once mastered, shooting at distances closer than 25 yards is an easy and simple matter.

It never hurts to shoot from a benchrested position at 25 yards as well. Everyone should know what they and their gun are capable of from a rested position, even if they are shooting a snubnose Chief. Many find an added degree of confidence in knowing they can shoot small groups with their handgun. This is something else that needs be done only once.

Practice that offhand shooting at 25 yards and practice a lot, and even more if you're shooting a snubnose J-frame. These guns will shoot surprisingly well, but many of us give up before we find that out.

Passive-aggressive much?

Then you either didn't read my post or didn't understand it and don't want to admit it. So I'll say it again:

At 25 yards, people fabricate excuses. They will blame the gun, the ammo, the wind, the light, the sights, everything. Trying to shoot groups at 25 yards teaches you nothing without either a coach or an already-developed skillset.

Besides which, most people can't shoot particularly well at 25 real yards anyway. If they were, folks would clean Timed and Rapid Fire targets in Bullseye with incredible regularity. But most people don't, do they?

Pretending like that's the standard is absurd and doesn't do any good for anybody.

At 3-5 yards, against very small targets, there's simply no way to make an excuse. If the shot didn't go into a 3-inch circle, it's not because the ammunition or gun is incapable of putting it there. Feedback is immediate and unavoidable, which is a hallmark of good practice.

Relax. My response wasn't a treatise on developing shooting skills, nor was it intended to be. Obviously, there is a lot more to it than what I included. I didn't plan to write an article.

I respect your opinion, but stand by what was in my post. My responses were based solely on my experience. Perhaps yours were also based on personal experience.