The American marksman can make good use of any firearm that comes into their possession. Good gun handling is an earned and perishable skill. It cannot be purchased; it must be patiently learned. The target is the arbiter of your efforts. You are either good at it or you’re not. And the patience you learn to apply to the skill pays off in many other aspects of your life. Being “good” is not about being the best; it’s about having the skills to pass muster at what the Bill of Rights calls “well regulated”.

What does that really mean? How do you explain that to people at cocktail parties? For the purposes of this article, let us reduce that to the simple question of can you consistently hit the 10-ring of a standard target at 100 yards? For the NRA SR-1 target, that is a circle 3 1/3 inches in diameter, about the size of a tangerine a football field away. Here’s the thing, anyone can do it once they learn to apply basic skills and self-discipline.

Let’s stay away from the murky world of politically loaded imagery. Just for fun, let us ask if you can do that with the original American rifle, a muzzle loading musket. In this case, a Thomson Center .50 caliber Hawken rifle firing a patched round ball over 70 grains of FFg black powder. About as back-to-basics as it gets. Here is my recent attempt at it. //

I can dial myself into the center of the target a bit faster than others. But holding center once there; that anyone can learn. For teaching people, a Ruger 10/22 or something like that at 1/2 the distance on an appropriately scaled target is the better learning tool. Truthfully though, this is not that high a bar to achieve for anyone who puts the time in to become a responsible gun owner and makes the effort to become “well regulated”. I assure you, you can do this too.