Long Distance Rifle Academy…
Learning to Hit Your Target at Extreme Distances
by Mark Bunch/President Royal Gorge Gun Club/Chairman Fremont County NRA
I have been teaching long distance and extreme long-distance rifle shooting for the majority of my life as it has always been one of my passions. That translates into a little over 5,000 students I have taught the art and science of long distance rifle shooting to over the past 38 years or so and please don’t do the math on that, lol !
As I teach all of my students, hitting your target at distance over the entire ARC of your cartridge is not for the feint of heart. Sixty percent of the equation will be decided by your skill level while the final forty percent of the equation rests on your equipment, ammunition, optics, etc.
For you NASCAR fans out there, Jeff Gordon, AJ Foyt and Dale Earnhardt JR. were some of the best race car drivers this planet has ever seen. None of them ever won Daytona in a POS Subaru!
Think of long-distance rifle shooting as part weaponized math and part mastery of earth-bound effects, all of which combine to make hitting your target at distance extremely challenging. As with race car driving, it begins with becoming brilliant at the basics and moves into learning your cartridge ARC and TOF, or Time of Flight to your target.
The further you shoot, the more TOF will come into play and the better you understand the things that happen to your bullet in flight, the more success you will achieve. Earth-bound effects like
gravity, air density, humidity and various other things such as the Coriolis Effect, spin drift, station altitude and latitude all come into play.
It is important when you are developing your knowledge and skill set, to train with purpose. Never just go out and plink, that will absolutely destroy your ability to improve. Even though there are 5 letters in the word plink, it is really a four-letter word. At the Royal Gorge Gun & Pistol Club in Cañon City, in addition to teaching our Long-Distance Rifle Academy Classes, I also run a rimfire rifle league as well as a long-distance shooting league and numerous precision rifle/sniper rifle matches for members, guests and visitors. A couple of weeks ago, we held our Medium Class Sniper Competition from 200 out to 1,500 yards. The course of fire was to engage 18 reactive steel targets with only 18 rounds, or one shot at each target. The only catch was that each shooter had only 5 minutes in which to fire all 18 of his rounds.
Nothing like adding pressure to your training to bring out all the flaws in your strategy or equipment choices. I won that match and earned the Gold Medal by hitting 16 out of the 18 possible targets in that 5-minute period. I used my Sako TRG 42 in 7mm PRC. The prevailing wind conditions that morning were reasonably challenging, 8-12 mph from 10 O’clock for the near wind zone and a tricky gust profile from 18-25 mph from 9 O’clock in the mid wind zone, and prevailing in the far wind zone of about 10-15 mph from
2 O’clock.
No doubt some of you reading this who like shooting things from far, far away are wondering how I determined what the wind was doing hundreds of yards from my shooting position without using one of those goofy wind meters. Simple, I learned decades ago what to look for in my environment in order to determine what my wind error uncorrected is going to be. That is one of the things I teach my students how to do and how to do it well.
I offer Four different levels of Rifle Skills for students, and combined they make up my Long Range Rifle Academy of classes. Level 1 is still a pretty advanced class where we discuss and practice modeling your hit percentage at distance, TOF, choosing equipment wisely, barricade shooting, and also shooting at running targets out to 600 yards! You have to know your equipment and cartridge pretty well to hit running targets out to that distance and my instructors and I will teach you how to do exactly that.
In my LRR Level 2 class, you will learn how to engage targets after God has turned out the lights for the day, how to operate in a two-man team as well as advanced hit modeling, six degrees of Freedom, and how to become a high confidence long-range rifleman.
Those students who continue in their pursuit of knowledge and take my LRR Level 3 class will study the effects of Density Altitude, Gravity, projectile tip friction failure, transonic effects on your chosen cartridge, as well as shooting through mediums such as glass and wood.
My Long-Range Rifle Classes 1 through 3 are all two -day classes, starting at 0800 and finishing up around 1,800 hours. I combine classroom instruction with real world rifle drills. For those of you who wish to continue to LRR Level 4 class you will learn how to stalk your targets through broken terrain, how to mask your noise, movement and reflection signatures.
We will teach you how to operate under oppositional surveillance from a Thermal Drone and you will be taught how to counter this type of surveillance and slink away after the shot using your new Spectral Ghillie Suit that you get to take with you at the end of our Level 4 class. I am offering Sentinel readers special pricing to take my Long-Range Rifle Classes and yes everyone has to begin with my Level 1 class. We shoot out to over a mile in my Level 1 Class, but you have to earn it by being successful at lesser distances.
My Next LRR Level 1 class is Sat/Sun, July 13 and 14, and the Sentinel reader price is the same as my gun club member price, or $350 per student. LRR Level 2 class is Sat/Sun, August 10-11, and LRR Level 3 class is slated for Sat/Sun, September 28 and 29.
My Long-Range Rifle Level 4 class is Fri/Sat/Sun, November 1 – 3 and those of you who finish this class will be very skilled and dangerous riflemen indeed. Regardless of your background, these classes will make you a better Long-Distance Rifleman than you were when you showed up. I guarantee it.