Bird, I second the comment about shooting more but not getting more game when going from a single shot to a semi-auto. When hunting with friends I used to get at least my share of the game with my single shot bolt action and only needed a few rounds to git 'er done, not a half a box.

Hunting squirrel with my dad, I used my single shot .22 and he used a single shot 12 ga. If Mr. bushy tail wasn't traveling too fast or erratically for me then he was dispatched with a .22 short hollow point, otherwise or if I missed (not often) my dad would take him with the shotgun.

I had a cousin up near Enid that was hired to "HERD CROWS" where he would take a sack lunch and a jar of water and go sit with his .22 under a tree in the watermelon field of his employer. When crows would menace the melons he'd shoot at them. He got a bonus for dead crows.

When I was in Jr High School (grades 7 & 8) just outside Lima, Ohio there was a 25 cent bounty on crows. At that time I was not allowed to roam at large unsupervised with an ACTUAL firearm and my Red Ryder signature model Daisy BB gun didn't have sufficient range. I had a schoolmate who got a pellet rifle and by having both of us pump it up together we could get it up to pressures where we could harrass crows but not reliably drop them A great monetary dissapointment.

In recent years I have been forced to optical sights for precision shooting. Shotguns of course don't present a problem like that. I can still hit a gallon milk jug about 7-8 times out of 10 with my Walther P-22 shooting off hand with open iron sights from about 200 ft. Once you learn the "hold over" that isn't too great a range. It is fun to shoot it 4-5 times in rapid succession with the hits easily recognized buy sound and dust flying out the top (jug is dirt filled and top cut off) and then hand the pistol to a friend without mentioning holdover and watch them try in vain to hit the jug.

I recently saw some demonstration shooting on the History Chanel where the shooter was tossing standard aspirin tablets up into the air and shooting them with a .22 rifle (not shot shells.) I recall a USAF shooting instructor that taught folks how to do that with a sightless BB gun and then he would demonstrate using tossed up BB's as targets and shoot them with his BB gun. A small but finite portion of the students could get to the level where they could shoot BB's out of the air with the BB guns. The sights were removed from these BB guns before they were handed out to the class. It was all instinctive point of aim shooting where you learn to become one with gun and have it be an extensiion of your body.

I learned to shoot a bow the same way. I never got to the level of the olympic contenders with their fancy sights but at varying ranges and with moving targets I didn't lose many matchups. Of course it is like playing chess with a 10 second move rule, it transforms the game to a completely different thing not at all like what Kasparov plays.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]