*another one from the Book of Faces, moved here for discussion. -Jack
Pro Tip: If you see a gun discussion on the internet, and you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, just chill and read, or comment truthfully. Don’t lie, wildly exaggerate, or just make shit up… Because everybody can tell, it is super obvious, you’re not fooling anyone, and it’s just pathetic. It’s funny when it’s coming from a young dude who’s dumb and cocky, but it’s just sad from somebody old enough to know better.
This advice is because I saw a post on a friend’s page, today who is a professional gun builder and worked in the industry in various capacities for probably three decades now, and some dude was telling him about how he routinely and easily uses his Yugo AK to hit soup cans at 200 yards… with iron sights. “it’s called practice dude”.
Now, is this doable? Sure. Just not on demand repeatable, because that soup can (why is it always a soup can or soda can with these guys?) is probably less than half the size of what even an exceptional example of that gun with the best possible 7.62×39 ammo is capable of hitting on its best day, and that front sight is covering up an area about 10x the size of the target at that range.
So it’s not bloody likely, internet rando, regardless of how many tens of thousands of rounds of ammo you swear you’ve put through it, (flawlessly, of course, as all cheap guns on the internet run Just As Good as more expensive guns).
Which brings us to part two of this specific subcategory of nonsense. The inflated round counts. My Brand Y is just as good as your Brand X and I’ve put TEN THOUSAND ROUNDS through it!
Because only on the internet do people buy $300 pistols or $600 rifles, and then put $3000 or $8000 worth of ammo through them. That’s super common behavior apparently.
In actuality guys who do actually shoot a lot know our approximate round counts, and some of us even keep exact log books (I don’t, I’m lazy, I just go by how many cases it is on), because that tells us when we need to do what kind of maintenance (it is amazing how all those 50k XDs on the internet never need new springs) and unless you’re shooting competition seriously, coin chasing, or a training junkie, you’re probably not putting up five figure round counts through a single gun. And most of us who do that stuff for fun, will have multiple different guns and back up guns that match the first one for when it breaks.
Really, most $300 pistols and $600 rifles could spontaneously combust once they hit 500 rounds, and 95% of the people who buy them would never know, because they never hit that round count. Move that to 1000 rounds and it would be like 99%.
The next reason this bullshit doesn’t fly anymore, is we’ve all got cameras on our phones, yet these guys never have videos of their super amazing feats.
My page is full of videos of me doing different drills and challenges. Some come out great. Some I come up lacking. But I post those too, because it’s still educational. There’s plenty of video evidence that I can shoot about as good as I claim that I can shoot. But these dudes who make the internet claims? There’s never video of them, go figure. They must be very private or something.
A little while back I saw where a newb put up a picture of his 10 yard pistol target, and it looked about like what you’d expect a newb’s 10 yard pistol target to look like. No shame in that. We all started somewhere. But along comes some random internet asshole, saying that’s trash, and how he could totally shoot a ten shot group that could be covered by a QUARTER, at 25 yards, FREEHAND, on demand, every time, using his Smith & Wesson Model 36… I shit you not.
And I was like, lol, the fuck you can. 😀 But the dude doubled down. So I said video, or it didn’t happen. Because either you’re a fucking dork ass liar, or congratulations, you are quite possibly one of the greatest shooters on Earth ever in all of human history. And I told him get me that video, and I’ll be happy to introduce him to the marketing people at various companies who would be ecstatic to sponsor him and shower him in free guns and ammo. But sadly his camera was broken or something. Oh well.
I’m pretty decent. I know I’m way better than average. I’ve got to shoot with guys who are actual master and grandmaster level shooters, so I know what really good looks like. We’ve all got actual scored targets, known distances, and shot timers, so what we can do is documented. Yet we’re all shit compared to these random guys on the internet. It’s a miracle such talent goes unnoticed!
Seriously guys, this isn’t the dawn of the internet gun forums anymore. Everyone is onto your bullshit. Shooters in general have gotten more experienced. The bell curve has shifted. Odds are there are several people reading your bullshit, who can easily outshoot you, and have forgotten more than you know. You can’t snow them. Stop trying. It’s just sad.
You know how you pick up a gun and it feels like a bag of sand?
Ha! I understood that reference!
I’m cross dominant (right handed but left eyed) and cant shoot for shit, not that I’ve done it a lot. I try to bring laughter to these posts.
So buy a Shockwave.*
“Note: not an entirely serious suggestion. Entirely.
Would it help with the whole “Stop before I shoot something slightly to your left!” problem?
Have you considered buying a Shockwave? Gotta hit SOMEthing! You just gotta!
In 40 years of shooting in various competitions, I’ve only seen one man who could routinely hit at extended ranges with an S&W m-36 (old model w/0.100″ front sight). His name was Steve McFarland; he shot with us at PHA in Thomasville, NC. I’ve seen him hit about 75% on NRA Hunter’s Pistol silhouette turkeys at 75 meters. If you don’t think that’s something special, try it yourself (for real) and come back & talk to me. I sure can’t do that .
Gone too soon; we miss you, Big Mac.
Well, at least he said it was a Yugo, not a WASR.
Dammit Larry, that guy was a Navy Ranger Delta Beret in Vietnam! Even though he’s only 35 years old! How dare you question his shooting skills!
And now he’s left the easy military life and leads a much more exciting and demanding career as a grandmaster ninja leading a 5-man quick-response hostage rescue team at the Skenogee Shopping Center in upper Wisconsin.
We are not to question the abilities of the Mall Ninja. We must instead back away slowly and shake our heads at his impressive claims of ninjosity.
mock not indiscriminately: rather, raise a glass in toast to Elisjsha Dicken, There are those who truly dwell in the tails of the bell curve.
The rando in question is a proud member of Meal Team 6.
How did Brass Balls Dolan, the Delta/Seal/Lurp/Recon/Paracommando react when he heard about this?
I like the 7.62×39 round much better than .223/5.56, and I’ve taken a few whitetails without a problem. The major problem with the round is the rifles/carbines from which it’s fired. My wife’s deer rifle is a CZ 527 (bolt) topped with a Leupold 3-9 x 50 scope that cost as much as the rifle did. The last time she confirmed zero on it before the season was at 100 yards…I was spotting for her, and her first round was dead center of the orange 1″ bullseye. She chambered and fired her next one, and I had to tell her I had no idea where it went; couldn’t find it on the (big 18″x24″) paper. Same thing with the third round, so we made safe and walked downrange to look. All 3 rounds went into (almost) the same hole, with a spread of maybe half-again the bullet diameter. That round is capable of it if used in a decent firearm.
I just bought a RRA LAR-47 which I call the “Franken-gun”. It’s a 7.62×39 upper mated to an AR-type lower that has a magazine well and release designed for AK-type magazines. It will shoot a sub-two-inch group at 100 yards.
I’ll have to agree that NONE of my other rifle/carbines (SKS, AKM) will shoot to better than angle-of-pie-plate, maybe 5″ at 100 yards, and I’ve scoped a few of those with good mounts and shot them from bench.
With regard to non-shooters (and I regard myself as that now that my eyes don’t let me shoot NRA bullseye competition anymore) and round count, I’ll just say that when I was qualifying my new .45 (Sig C3) for carry use, I put 700 rounds through it in 2 days, using every kind of different ammo I had (ball, JHP, 185-gr to 230-gr), and 24 different magazines to verify that they all worked. In all that, I had 3 failures to feed, all related to one particular magazine. That mag got flattened with a rock before being tossed into the trash barrel at the range. So even non-shooters can go through some fairly high round counts.
Now if I want to tell a story, I can talk about the last whitetail I took. A running shot at 500 yards…I’ll explain about the powder burns on the hide later.
I was there! Man, that shot was EVERY INCH of 500 yards! The powder burns are from where we found out it wasn’t quite dead and so you put a coup de grace round through the same hole.
Just like we did back in WWI.
😉
Even though the range isn’t what you can get from 7.62X39, I’ve found that a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range generally kills whitetails on the first hit.
And pre-cooks them so you don’t have to order out.
“Hey, you can’t do that here!”
“Wrong…BOOM”
“The sign says you can’t do that!” – Sumdood
“The sign is wrong.” – Ron White
I have exactly one gun that I’ve probably put 5000-10,000 rounds through. A Ruger Mk II pistol that I bought new in the mid-90s. Only reason it is anywhere near that round count is a period in 2002-2003 where life was stressful and my release was going to the local range. Was going through 500 rounds / week for awhile, back when 500 rounds of .22 was $9. The gun has held up remarkably well, the magazines less so.
Similar position as you: I got 50 pounds of mixed .22LR at an auction a while back, and still have about 3 ammo cans left of it (the .50 cans, not the .30).
My rifle with the most rounds on it (not counting a 10/22 because I literally have no good method of counting) is my LMT MARS-H – I put 200 rounds through it the first week or so (two weekends, 10 different boxes of match to see what worked best), then bought a thousand rounds from the same batch that shot* a quarter of a minute. I still have at least 200 left in magazines, and I’m pretty sure I only opened one of the 500 round boxes, so the other is probably under the bed.
*I can’t shoot that well even if I bolted it to a steel table, but I have a buddy who can – anything I could shoot under 1 minute (any 3 shots) he’d try and I kept the best knowing I’d have a benchmark to track against.
P.S. confirmed: I have 200 rounds in magazines, a sealed case of 500, and who knows how many in the ammo boxes I’m not curious enough to dig through. Still can’t reliably shoot under 1 MOA though 🙁
I will say it’s entirely possible to get a $600 rifle (with iron sights) that will out shoot most users. That’s just modern manufacturing being awesome.
Funnily enough the best shooting rifle I ever had that wasn’t stupidly expensive was also ancient: a 6.5 Swiss that shot like a laser. No good way to mount sights so it was only as accurate as your eyesight, but anything I could see well enough to aim at I could hit (I have bad eyes, so that’s probably part of it).
Still wish I hadn’t sold it.
Some people can do crazy things.
I’m not one of them.
But I’ve met some, and none of them have been interested in demanding validation from internet randos.
The guy who used a barely modified M1 Garand with iron sights from 300 yds, offhand, quick fire with reload, and you could cover his group with a quarter?
According to him, “I must have gotten lucky.” (And I don’t doubt that from his point of view that this was true. I just expect that he got 3” groups with regularity.)
That gun must have been forged in the fires of the Gods by Hephaestos himself, not one of his assistants. 1/4 minute of angle out of a Garand?
For that one string, anyway. (Shrug) Pretty sure it would have been a bigger group had it been locked in a bench. Sometimes variables cancel themselves out.
Like he said, he got lucky.
Still, it was awe inspiring to watch.
It happened at the High Desert Regional aboard MCAGCC, back in ‘98
I watched Ben Stoeger run a stage at Nationals a few years ago. Dayum. I bought his book shortly thereafter.
“angle-of-pie-plate”
Chuckle.
I didn’t even know you COULD throw an AK that far…
Ask for their practiscore and see what that gets you. Lotta people running around claiming to shoot Grandmaster I never see at the local matches.