Some of the Best Offhand Target or Hunting Shots You've Ever Made?

I shot a doe through the lungs at 140 yards with a SRH 44mag standing offhand. The bullet hit a second doe in the head 10 yards back, she dropped in her tracks. I have killed deer at greater distance with that gun but not offhand. Yes, I had two tags.
I was target shooting with my sister and helping her with shooting technique. Jokingly, I held my 38spl LCR upside down "Miculek style" and shot at an 18 inch steel plate at 200 yards. As luck would have it, I hit it. My sister is under the impression I can do it every time.

My best was with a CZ83 380 12 years, probably more ago. I was down by a river with someone and pointed to a stick, about two feet long and maybe an inch wide, laying vertically about 20 yards away on the opposite bank. Fired, hit dead center and split the branch in two. The person I was with oohed and ahhed. I was smart enough to holster it right away and stop shooting lest the truth that I was a poor shot come to light.

I was about 16 when i had went to our local sportsmans club lake to fish, of course i had my ever-present ruger single six on my hip.
It happened that our county sheriff showed up with his brother in law . We chatted for a bit, and he asked about my gun. "Can you hit that bird?",he asked. (It was a finch flittering on some thistles a short distance away.) I drew and was ready to fire, but the little bird kept flitting around. Finally, just as i had almost commited to fire, it flittered towards another thistle. I flicked my wrist in disgust and jerked the trigger. Much to my surprise, the feathers puffed, and the poor little guy bit the dust. The sheriff and his bnl witnessed the whole thing. They thought it was quite a feat.....i never told them it was luck.
We became friends and he has told the story several times since.

z7 said:

My 16yr old brother made a great shot last Christmas, 215yds (via laser) at 16oz water bottle, offhand with a 10/22,first shot he nailed it. He called it skill and a superior understanding of physics

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Ask him to use his superior understanding of physics to do it again!

Speaking of lucky shots every time a plane flys over my shooting bench I think of the opening scene from Air America.

Sorry for no sound, only clip I could find

Back in 1985 I was a new MT Hwy Trooper , I'd just arrived at my new, very rural Station. I was on a rural road when I saw a Rancher and a few of his employees stopped with a few trucks and a tractor. I stopped to see if I could be of service. All was well, they were just getting on the road after baling a field.

I introduced myself, met all of them, etc. As we were chatting , a ground squirrel got up on a rock in the field, maybe 150 yds away and was loudly chirping at us. One of the hands said "If your any kind of a pistol shot ,You should be able to get that gopher".

I turned to Gary the Ranch owner and asked if he minded....He didn't.

We carried 4" Smith model 28's then and mine was more than accurate enough. Plus I'd literally shot 2k of rds through it between the Academy and that point in time.

So I took a two hand hold, centered the gopher pretty well and the shot broke. With a nice wet PLOP, I knocked him right off that rock. Hit him square in the chest. Poor Bastard! THE absolute, unluckiest gopher in all of Montana.

I CALMLY pulled out the spent rd and walked to my car to replace it. Like I pulled off shots like that all the time. The Rancher and his men were absolutely IMPRESSED.

The best part of this...one of the hands was an absolute drunken , blowhard...He never forgot that shot. He never screwed with me either. And it was told and retold at the local Bar, many times.

Thankfully I didn't MISS. LOL. That's MY lucky shot story.

FN in MT

January managed deer hunt; does only, three animal tags/ limit. Three does running in tandem (left to right) at about 100 yards thru a cut bean field. Swung my Kimber .308 left to right thru the middle animal, crosshairs hit the very front of her chest and I squeezed the trigger. She immediately rolled forward and landed on her back - dead at the shot. I was so astonished at my shot that I forgot that I had two more tags and the other does were legal - when I regained my head, the other two animals had run into the brush. When I approached the deer, I noted that the shot hit right below the base of the neck - instantly turned her lights out - my most skilled and luckiest shot.

When I was 12 I shot a blackbird through the eye at over 100 yards, standing, off hand, with a Crossman pellet gun. I recall having to hold several feet of elevation.

Pure luck for sure, but still my best shot ever

Number one, hunting pheasant, rabbit, quail with my only gun, a 24DL 22/20. Dropped a pheasant flushed by Maggie, my Springer. When I went to reload I found the rifle barrel fired and not the 20. Selector must have been bumped. Didn't load rifle barrel after that.
Number two, 50 yard musket championship at Friendship around '70. Off hand, 96 with 7 X's. Record that held for all of three days. Record was years old.

Best (lucky) shot I've ever made was a on a 200 lb. feral pig sow on a dead run at 80 yards, with an open sight .22. Led her head by a foot and dropped her in her tracks. The person I was with, and me, were like What???

I got 2nd place in my state high school FFA sporting clay championship. 49 out of 50. The kid who won got 49 also but he went like 21 straight without a miss and I was 19 or something like that which was the tie break. It was only the 4th time I'd ever shot sporting clays and I am certain I could not have done it again with 200 more tries. I did it with my browning BPS upland special which is only a 22" barrel. All my team mates made fun of me because they thought it was a youth gun. I stopped competing because my school kept the trophy and I thought that was bogus.

Rabbit 75 yards with power line 880 with bbs. Age 8 ish

Coyote at 450 yards free hand 25-06 at age 13.

Pheasant 22lr scoped flying at 100 plus yards, right in the neck.

Duck gliding to land about 130 yards with a 22lr.

Got really into bird hunting with a recurve and flu flus. Made a few good shots during that deal.

Rabbit at 250 yards with 22lr. Kinda cheated as I was at a bench with a decked out 10/22 with a target scope.

Several deer running 100 to 400 yards. Most recent 350 yards 308 win about 4 weeks ago.

About '70 or '71 our neighbor complained that he had just mowed his hayfield and the groundhog holes had had tripped his sickle bar mower several times.(a break-away mechanism to protect it from damage if you hit something.)
Groundhog hunting was big sport here in at the time. My dad had(still has) a Rem 700 .243 that he kept dialed in for groundhogs. We took his .243 and drove to the high bluff overlooking the bottomland hay field. Soon he had shot a couple groundhogs. We decended the hill to get their tails for the $0.50 Farm Bureau bounty. As we were collecting the tails, we spotted another, and another. We had great sport belly-crawling around in that 10acre hay field shooting groundhogs. I remember that one in particular he had whistled to get the hog to sit up on his haunches. All that remained of his head was a flap of skin with an ear on it.
That was the single best varmint hunt i have ever been in on. Some of the best shooting i have ever witnessed.[the usmc teaches good form].
The final note of this story is that the next day, i had more chiggers than could be counted. They were in one solid welt anywhere that elastic touched my skin. Our family doctor prescribed a sedative that kept me from scratching them. I had a fever too.
Looking back, it was worth it.

Shot a crow that had just taken off from atop a pine tree with my nylon 66. Both my son's witnessed it, missed the first shot, but the second connected. Told them I didn't lead him enough. Used to shoot hand tossed quarters, lime rock, golf balls with my nylon 66. Got pretty good, especially on the golf balls with cci stingers.

A guy I work with was telling me when he was a kid he shot his BB gun so much that he could hit thrown quarters. He said he used to shoot dragonflys out of the air for hours. That's about 10 levels above my shooting ability.

someguy2800 said:

A guy I work with was telling me when he was a kid he shot his BB gun so much that he could hit thrown quarters. He said he used to shoot dragonflys out of the air for hours. That's about 10 levels above my shooting ability.

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I did that with .22 shorts as a kid. The trick was to hit 'em immediately when they paused in flight....

When we moved to the country 20 years ago, we converted a clearing in the woods to a yard. I had a heck of a problem with pocket gophers, and was eradicating them by any means at my disposal. As a result, the .22 was always handy. Had a fellow come in and do some grading with a small dozer, then spread some black dirt for me. He was at it the better part of a day. At the end of the day, we were squaring up on the tailgate of my pickup. I'm counting cash, and happened to glance out toward all this newly spread black dirt, and saw the telltale mound of dirt appearing RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE YARD. A slight breeze was blowing. Stopping in mid count, I took his hand and placed it on top of the cash with the instruction, "Hold this. I'll be right back." I stepped into the house and grabbed the .22 from behind the door. I snapped the safety off and leaned into the open garage door frame, and watched the dirt pile in the sights. As the dirt pile began to move again, the dirt is being pushed upward, and I aimed at the top of the mound and touched off a round. 60 yards out, the top inch of the mound disappeared, and the gopher rolled out. Snapping the safety back on, turning around and laying the rifle into the bed of the pickup, I asked him, "Now. Where were we?" I'll never forget his response. "We were just talking about what good friends we are..."

I believe the trick here is to act like you do it all the time....

Offhand

Rifle-Squirrel 75 yards high in tree. Marlin 39 22lr .

Revolver-Squirrel- S&W K22, moving at about 45 yards on 5th shot.

Tip: Use standard velocity ammo, less sonic boom from bullet. Squirrels reappear sooner after shooting.

4 Arctic Wolves, 4 shots. 200-400 yards and moving away fast. Me shooting the M-39 Mosin, the wife catching the vid action...

Got that on vid, posted it too years back, only photobucket has a hole in it......

I don't recall my best ones. Too many? kidding. Just to change it up real quick, I'll tell you my worst.

I shot from a young age and learned proper safety even before I passed my firearms safety course. Shot plenty rimfires and busted clays as a youth but when it was my turn to join the old timers at our hunting camp at age 11 or so, I was gifted a 30-30 Winchester model 94 with buck horn sights...the weekend before opener...with one box for practice...at 100 yards.

I somewhat understood how buckhorns worked at 100 yards and was told "good enough" when my bullets landed inside the ass end of a coffee can at that distance.

My first shot at my first deer ever, came in at about 200-225. Being a stupid kid I fired off rounds, seen they were low and "walked" up shots on the buckhorns and finally hit her on the 7th shot freehand.

It was a big eye opener for me at a young age. I traded a perfectly good lever Winchester (pre-64) for a Mauser 98k a reloading press, and a handful of books a couple years after that incident.

Its never taken me more than one shot for a whitetail since. Self taught reloading/accuracy/ethics due to being horrified on my worst offhand miss.

I can follow mn fats.......:
My first deer season, 1977.
All of our elaborate plans for a hunt were foiled by an all-night rain. The river that runs through our hunting property spilled out of its banks. Tge alternate plan was for dad to drop me off 2 miles from home, and i would hunt home, in the rain(i really wanted to hunt!). He dropped me off as close as he could to the river bottom. I walked about 40 yds and saw a doe and fawn in the dim light about 40 yds from me. I shouldered my 1100, aimed at the doe, and killed the fawn.
Thus began 40yrs of deer hunting.

Hate to admit, but my best of hand shot was as a South Carolina doe with a neck shot at 60 yards, but she was running

I didn't pull the trigger, if that is the right word, but I was inside the tank, an M-60, in Grafenwohr (hope I spelled that right ) Germany, when we nailed a deer with a 105 X 762mm practice round. On the fly, at about five hundred meters, first try. Twenty some pounds of cast iron projectile at over 4000 FPS. The deer disappeared in a red mist, the German's found about it, and we were almost court-marshaled over the incident.

I have never seen a more incredible shot in my life.. ... or a more definitive one shot kill.

As to a shot I actually was involved in MYSELF....I once bragged to a high school friend that I could shoot a bird out of the sky with a 22. He challenged me, we stepped outside and I took a shot at a passing bird.

You guessed it...I hit it and it tumbled out of the sky.

Pure, stupid, dumb luck it was.. but I was taking full credit for it. With puffed out chest and much bragging I announced I could do that all day long.

Ahhhh....the hubris of a teenager......

I was exposed a week later.... When I couldn't hit anything.

I had a really nice sporterized o3a3 in high school. Someone had put a beautiful walnut sporter stock, colt level bluing, and very nice Lyman rear peep site. With a group of friends watching I shot an old steel water tank stood up on it's side making a target about 7 ft in diameter. I had no idea of the range but cranked the rear peep to max elevation. Held center of the target and let one go. I was as shocked as anyone when we heard the faintest ting of bullet strike. I'll take the credit but it had as much to do with where the truck got parked as anything. LoL

I want to play the worst shot as well.

My cousin and I were left at home and up to our own devices once. Must have been 12 or 13. We thought that we could get away with shooting grandpa's python. The same one I posted a pic of not long ago.
We took a couple full sodas to set up for targets. I took the first shot. After the muzzle blast/recoil from a snub nose 357, I see the soda was still there. I was about to take a second shot when a tree just fell over in slow motion. I had about severed one of grandma's new trees that was probably 4 feet left from my target.
We stood the little tree up and tied a splint to try and keep it that way. I watered it for a while but it didn't make it. Had to fess up finally as to why it was dead and had a splint. Without a doubt the worst shot I ever taken.