The Everyday Marksman

A bit of an off-the-cuff musing about the current state of the second amendment legal world. I've been in this debate for a long time, and I think we've got a lot of momentum behind us- but I also think there's some serious risk in the future. The debate is not over, not by a long shot.

At the start of October, I went to a Project Appleseed Pistol Clinic to get a refresh on my pistol skills and see what the new program was all about. I came away both satisfied with my performance and appreciating the hard work that the Appleseed folks put into developing this new curriculum. Let's dig in!

I've got a bit of a confession to make, and it's embarrassing. I'm not all that great with pistols. I'm not a bad pistol shooter, per se. But on balance, my pistol shooting lags way behind my rifle shooting. I think that's a problem, so let's talk about why I'm going to fix it.

Let's talk long term. Too many people think that success is just a few weeks or months away, when that is far from the truth. In reality, success is a culmination of long term effort often years in the making. In this piece, I take a little known two day challenge and show you how I would break it down into a series of seasons and blocks that could be repeated over and over again, always driving closer and closer to success.

I've got a little bit of a bone to pick with how a lot of the shooting culture talks about drills. Much like weight lifting and gym bro culture, it seems a lot of shooters are more interested in flexing their egos than actually using drills as a way to improve. But how, exactly, should we approach that?

There's been a question floating around the web that I wanted to take a poke at. If you were advising someone on how to start their own "serious" arsenal, what would be your suggestions? In what priority order? HEre's my answer.

My recent post on establishing a fitness hierarchy made me realize that I need to do the same thing for marksmanship training. So here we are. Today I'm discussing my breakdown for prioritizing training distances and my reasoning for them.

In the last episode, I mentioned something called the homeostasis problem. It's a way of viewing why big changes in life are so difficult to make. It was going to be a large aside in that article, so much so that I decided it was worth its own post. So here we are: the homeostasis problem.

Mindset is one of the core topics of The Everyday Marksman, and it's one of the four corners in our pyramid of performance, but I've never planted a flag in the ground about what exactly I mean by, "Mindset." So let's fix that.

In the last episode, I discussed the Martial Marksman ideal and how it relates to the various topics I talk about here. One of the challenges that anyone going down this path quickly runs into is the fact that there is a lot of “stuff” to learn and practice. It’s one thing for a professional soldier to do these things, but it’s a very different beast for Everyday Marksmen like you and I.