I have limited experience with guns. Took pistol and rifle marksmanship classes during my freshman year of college, and had an afternoon at a firing range with a gun-enthusiast friend several years ago, but don’t own any. Never fired a shotgun.
Recently received a video clip via email. This is the video: it shows Tim Bradley pulling off some ridiculous sharpshooting shots, wiping out flocks of hand-thrown clay pidgeons, one at a time, in rapid-fire sequence.
Is this for real? Can someone actually aim a gun that rapidly, that precisely, from that many awkward stances? Or are there special effects/video editing involved?
It’s a shotgun, so there’s some spread to the shot pattern, but not much: his shots take out the pidgeons one at a time, so he’s definitely aiming at each individual pidgeon, and his spread is narrow enough that he never seems to take out two with a single shot.
I used to watch “American Shooter” and compared to some of the stuff they showed during the “shot of the week” segment this looks pretty tame. I’m pretty sure they had guys that could have done the same thing with a revolver. A single action revolver.
I checked and the seems to be something similar on the Outdoor Channel called Impossible Shots.
I watched a guy doing some of those shots when I was in the Boy Scouts, only he did it with a pump shotgun. He could shoot multiple skeets out of the air, shoot them with his back turned using a mirror, and a few others. One time, a launched skeet broke into 3 pieces and he shot all 3 before they hit the ground.
I’m wondering how he’s able to get off that many shots in a salvo. I don’t see any place on that gun where it looks like you could fit seven cartridges all loaded at once.
Oh, OK, I thought that was a second barrel. Yeah, double-barrel shotguns are usually side-by-side, but I thought this one was just different from the norm for whatever reason.
I’ve never seen a shotgun with such a low recoil. Besides a special gun, he must be using special loads with very little powder. It doesn’t take much to break a clay disk.
Semi auto shotguns have sognificantly less recoil than pumps. Remington 1100s, with full power buck, have very little recoil.
By milling a few spots here and there and/replacing the recoil spring, you can get an 1100 to fire reduced recoil bird shot, and it has almost no recoil. It’s not a super special gun, or super special load necessarily, although he moth use them. It can be dine with off the shelf stuff if you have some experience.
As for the video – it’s almost certainly legit. Those people are called trick shots, and they’re pretty good. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing one in person, and it was… A sight to behold.
I’m good at skeet, but these guys make me look like a green pea.
On thinking about it a bit more, it wouldn’t be all that hard, once you know the trick to it. First, practice on throwing the targets, so you can get them to a relatively consistent height and distance (notice that he throws all the targets himself). Then, hold the gun a little bit off-balance, so it’ll fall on its own. If you support it in the right place (which you can find with a bit of trial and error), it’ll fall at just the right rate to track the falling targets. Then you just need to make relatively small adjustments as it’s falling to match the scatter of the targets.
It’d still take practice, of course, but I imagine it wouldn’t actually be much harder than learning to juggle. It might be more expensive, though… Judging from the huge pile of casings at the end of the video, that guy probably spends a heck of a lot on ammo, and I don’t know what the targets run, either.
Quick aside - I think the majority of double-barrel shotguns nowadays are over and under. My father bought himself a nice side-by-side a few years ago and it was extremely tough to find. Tons of over and unders though.
I can assure you that it’s very hard to learn how to do. Most people couldn’t hit 10 targets slow-firing at a range while aiming, let alone in awkward positions after tossing their own targets into the air.
It’s much harder than learning how to juggle. And yes, it’s much more expensive. Even when you consider that he has sponsorship, he had to earn those, which means that he dropped thousands upon thousands of dollars on guns and ammunition, not to mention the time that it took to learn how to do it.
I didn’t mean to imply that it didn’t take a lot of practice, just that, if you let the gun fall like I describe, it’d be easier than it looks (given that it looks friggin’ impossible).
