Shotgun Practice With a Target

Video Transcript

"And we're here in the woods with our shotgun, getting ready to go shotgun hunting, and one of the things that we need to do before we go out in the field and shotgun hunt, is to shoot our gun, so that we're familiar with the weapon, and that we are also familiar with the pattern, that's being projected downrange, so what we want to do here, is select a location where we can pattern our shotgun. Shoot a shell, and not incur any liability down range, as far as potentially injuring someone, or something. What we'll do is, I have an automatic shotgun here that I'll be working with, and I'm only going to load as many, as what I expect to shoot at one time. I have a button here on the side that I push. It's right here, and since I don't like my action to snap shut. It has quite a substantial spring. I'll hold it with my right hand, and let it ease in, so now with our gun still pointing down, I'm ready to load my shell into the magazine, so I push my button. Push my shell in, and push it into the magazine. You can see it's locked in place, if you will, held in the magazine, one shell. I've only loaded one shell, because that's what I intend to shoot right now. We can see over here towards our right, we've got our small bug. He's now in a danger zone, and he's now out of the way, so now with the bug out of the way. I've confirmed the other animals are off at a distance. We're going to pattern our shotgun here. This is standing with your feet at a ninety degree angle to your target, or at least my back foot. That's how I'm most comfortable, and my shoulder facing it, my left shoulder. I shoot right handed. This is the most comfortable position for me, and it allows me to hold the shotgun, or any gun quite steady. Safety off, bringing the gun up. I'm aligning it, aligning the top bead, with the bottom of the groove, in the back. Here we're at our target that we just shot at. I aimed, my aim, point of aim, was right down here, and we can see that we tore up the paper quite well. We see all the BB's around the pellets, or the pellets around the target. This again was at twenty yards. The further back that you step, the further away from the target you get, the fewer BB's will hit the target. What will happen, is that your target will widen, as you step back away from the target, and fire. Conversely, as you move closer to your target, the pattern will tighten. You'll have a much narrower pattern, and it's a much more devastating pattern at that narrow focus, because there's a lot of lead in a small place, there. They pack a lot of punch."