Which is the most challenging to master?

I'll probably be ridiculed for this, but I would have to vote for the bow. Keep in mind, I have yet to achieve "mastery" of any of the listed items.

No point in asking, its very subjective and based on personal experience. Say for example you grew up hunting, youre a crack shot with a rifle or shotgun, but you never owned a handgun until maybe 30 then youd probably find handgun harder. Or say the reverse was true. Depends from person to person.

I am with TDK. Just about anything can be mastered with practice.

Now if you ask Tiger Woods and me how long it takes to master golf, you will get two completely different answers!

This is like asking, "Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?"

blackops said:

Which is the most challenging to master?

Click to expand...

Answering questions like this!

Scott

I'd chime in with the others so far, but will give my own angle here:

I grew up around hunting, and learned to shoot long guns from the time I was a small child. As such, it has always appeared that shotguns and rifles have come naturally to me! I didn't really start shooting pistol until I was a teenager, and I always found pistol to be much more challenging (probably for exactly that reason).

Anyway, I've been shooting pistol for a long time now, and I don't doubt my abilities with a handgun these days. Still, I feel that I shoot rifle and shotgun better than I shoot pistol, at least relative to others. In qualifications at work I run a long term average of about 98% with the handgun, whereas I run near 100% with the rifle and shotgun.

In order from easiest to most difficult as far as accuracy goes (assuming all are modern weapons)....

Rifle, Bow, Pistol.

I doubt I'll ever "master" any of those three. So, I don't know. I do know it's substantially easier for me to hit the bull's eye with a rifle, assuming the same relative difficulty of shot. The bow is the most challenging for me. It's also the one with which I have the least experience.

Quite a can of worms

I bowhunt. With a string and stick and no wheels. If you want to use a compound bow, that's pretty easy to become competent with -- easier than a firearm.

If you use a longbow or recurve, you don't get to use a trigger or even a sight (unless you want to defeat the purpose of traditional archery). This is MUCH harder than aiming any kind of gun I've ever shot.

I don't think I've mastered anything. But as far as picking up the basics and being able to function well in real world applications, the modern rifle is by far the easiest to use. You can be nailing bullseyes at 100 yards with an hour's training. The handgun is tricky, and the bow ranges from tricky to exceptionally difficult depending on how far the target is and how primitive the bow. An English Longbow would take a lifetime to really get competent with.

It depends highly on your definition of "master".

I would have to say, generally speaking, from least difficult to most: rifle, pistol, bow.
But it really depends on the specific equipment.

A bow. Takes muscles (and tone in those muscles) that are used for nothing else.

Personal

From my own experience I can say that the rifle, hands down, was easiest to achieve good results in the least time.

I've used a bow (old fashioned Pearson 30# fiberglass recurve), rifles of various sorts, and a pistol or six.

With the least training and the least experience, I have consistently gotten the best results with a rifle. Some better than others.

At fifty yards I'm better more consistently with a pistol, given the same amount of practice as for a bow.

I got reasonably good with the bow inside of fifty yards, but consistency kinda stank.

I have better control with a pistol than a bow, and this was achieved with fewer range hours.

I would say that consistent good results with a bow requires more skill and more discipline, especially at ranges beyond fifty yards.

I remember during rifle qualification in the USAF hearing that some of the guys had scores of fifty and less out of a total possible sixty valid hits. Wait -- you mean someone was able to miss that target with a rifle? I was arguably one of the greenest guys with a firearm in my squadron, and all I did was line up the sights, pull the trigger, do it again. Sixty for sixty. And I figure if can do that, anyone can do that.

If a green recruit with only one day's practice with a rifle can keep all sixty on the silhouette, that has to be my choice for "easiest to master."

Pistol would be next.

Bow would be the most work for me to master. There are more issues than simple accuracy. It seems to me that strength and stamina/fatigue play a bigger role than they do with firearms.

For me: most challenging = bow.

It depends highly on your definition of "master".

Click to expand...

I have to agree with Nulfisin. I started shooting bows back when compounds were first introduced and then I learned to shoot a real bow. I haven't held a compound since the late seventies. I qualified expert marksman with a rifle in '72 and shot IPSC for many years but I don't think any of those are as satisfying as making a nice shot with a recurve. It's a Zen thing.

It all depends on a persons abilities. Some are good at some things but not others. It's whatever you have a knack for.

If you mean hardest to improve your skills with I would say a pistol. It's more given to human error through less steady points that contact the body and a shorter sight radius. This can be different for some individuals such as myself. I am left handed but right eye dominant. It was easier to learn pistols because I could use my dominant hand with both eyes open. Rifles were the hardest because I was also learning to use my weak hand for everything.

In school I shot rifles in competition and was very successful, although I grew up firing pistols. When it came time for me to take up hunting I felt using a firearm was unfair considering my level of experience with them, so I turned to hunting with a compound bow. After getting the technique and muscle tone down over the course of a couple months, I found it to be fairly simple to split arrows at 25yds.

IMO, the rifle was more difficult to master than the bow, but I think my mastery of the rifle made my ability to pick up the bow considerably easier. If I'd started off with just the bow, it could've taken me years to get it down pat.

Handguns to this day are still the most difficult for me to be consistent with, but are what I fire the most.

-MW

Very little experience with a bow, so between rifles and pistols, hands-down, the pistol is FAR more difficult to master. Pistols are more dependant on a steady, consistent hold as well as sight alignment. Think about this. Take a .357 lever rifle, and a .357 revolver, and use both of them to hit a 200 yard target. Which one is easier to make the hits with?

tpaw said:

It all depends on a persons abilities. Some are good at some things but not others. It's whatever you have a knack for.

Click to expand...

Unless your like me...and have to practice and start ground up with everything!

marriage

Which is hardest to master?
Whichever one I am currently shooting.

For me, the bow. Give me a bow and an arrow and it's even odds which goes downrange, the bow or the arrow.

It's just not worth the bother to me at this point.

Depends on what you are going to do, ex. point shooting, skeet, competition, live game, iron sights, ect. Id have to say that to me I was able to becaome moderately accurate with a moderate draw compound bow in a modest ammount of time. I think bow is the easiest. Then rifle, then pistol being the hardest to master the accuracy of at range.

Part of the reason for the demise of the medieval knights and bowmen was firearms. It took years and years to train a knight. It took years to train a longbowman. It took days to teach an arquebusser the basics and weeks to teach him how to shoot well enough to take out a knight or bowman.

Based on that I'd say mastering the bow is much more difficult than mastering a rifle or pistol.