Don't convince yourself long range handgunning is anything that it is not. When it comes to wheelgunning, shooting far really isn't so different than shooting short. If you can't shoot small at short ranges, you won't be able to shoot small at long ranges, and there are no tricks.
Focus on Fundamentals: The only difference in technique shooting long instead of short is wind and range correction management. If you can shoot small at short range, the same fundamentals apply to shoot small at long range.
Be realistic. Shooting 1" groups at 100yrds with a bolt action rifle is simple. Shooting 1" groups at 100yrds with a revolver isn't common. Most Ruger, Taurus, and S&W revolvers I have owned in the last ~15yrs have all been capable of somewhere between 2.5-4MOA raw precision. Be happy shooting 4" groups at 100yrds. Be exceptionally happy shooting anything smaller than that.
Make your job easy: Long and heavy triggers are detrimental to precision, and in a lightweight handgun, that's even more important. A 2lb trigger under a 4lb scoped revolver means the shooter has to work FAR harder to avoid influencing the revolver than he would with a 4lb trigger under a 13lb varmint rifle. Proper trigger technique will limit your potential to influence the firearm, but having perfect trigger control on every shot is a dream. Short, crisp, light triggers are an advantage. Trigger stops (overtravel), minimal sear engagement (creep), lighter trigger pull, and of course, only shooting in SA mode are ways to reduce your trigger influence on the shot.
Get supported. There are guys out there who can shoot exceptionally small off-hand fired groups, but it's not so common, and it's far more difficult than it needs to be. Unless you're competing, there's not much sense in working off-hand. There are a few good pistol rests out there, some better than others. A bag under your wrists is ok, but it's not nearly as good as a V-block under your barrel and a sandbag under your grip. I prefer the MTM pistol rest or the (discontinued) BogPod PSR.
Shoot big enough targets. This is really the book end to the "be realistic" above. Think about the relative scale of your targets. When guys shoot a pie plate at 25yrds with a revolver, let's just say a 10" plate, that's a 100" plate at 250yrds. It's a fools errand to stick that same pie plate out there at 250 and expect to connect. If your 25yrd groups are 1" on a 4" circle, then you'd need a 40" target at 250yrds, and should expect no better than a 10" group, and most likely, considerably larger. Unless you can reliably hit 1" target spots at 25yrds, you can't expect to reliably hit 10" targets at 250yrds.
Get a good look: Lots of guys swear against scopes on revolvers, but it's a simple fact - you can't hit what you can't see. Consider: a Ruger front sight blade is 1/8" wide, and considering most 2 handed shooters will have the front sight about 25" from their eye, that means your front sight blade is over 16MOA wide. So let's pretend you can hold that front sight blade within the middle 25% on target - that's over 4" of horizontal dispersion on target. If you consider the "light" on either side of the blade to be ~1/64", just bouncing the front sight front one side of the gap to the other will mean another +/-2" of horizontal. You're talking 6"+ wide groups before you even add in ANY group size. Equally, a red dot on top will typically have a 2MOA to 4MOA dot, a lot better than 16MOA, but still pretty rough. A magnified optic will have 1/4MOA crosshairs. Guys get thrown off by their "wobble" or "shakiness" in scopes, but realize - you're ALWAYS shaking that much, you just can't see it. Two things need to happen - 1) learn to minimize the wobble and shake, and 2) learn to live with your minimal wobble & shake.
Use your tools: Similar to getting a good look - if you don't have the right tools, your job becomes a lot harder. There's enough drop under revolver bullets at 250-300yrds that a ballistic calculator can be your friend. Very, very few handgun scopes are available with graduated reticles, so you really need the ability to dial. Many of us even use rifle scopes on handguns to give sufficient magnification, graduated reticles, and dialable turrets.
Shoot on a proper range - and with a spotter: Shooting on a grass field is common, but it's rarely productive for walking shots onto target. Having a good dirt berm behind the target is handy, but only if your impacts are on the berm. If you take too long of leap from your last target range to the next, you might not be on the berm, and splash hiding under grass doesn't tell you anything. Scoped revolvers often recoil enough to lose the target in your scope, so having a spotter on hand to call impacts is of high value.
Recognize your handicap: A revolver or pistol will never shoot as small as a specialty pistol. Bolt action and break action handguns can be bought in conventional bottleneck rifle cartridges, and can deliver remarkable precision. The TC Encore & Contender are the common specialty pistols on the market today, where the Nosler NCH is a custom option. There are a few custom XP100 gunsmiths out there, and of course, any bare bolt action action can be built as a specialty pistol. Savage Strikers are out there to be bought used at fair prices too. These certainly have a different appeal than revolvers, but they also have different capabilities. I love shooting long with revolvers, but "long" is relative. Shooting 300yrds with a revolver is exceptionally long, whereas 300yrds is nothing but a warm up for a specialty pistol in a cartridge like 243win, 7-08, or 6.5 creed. Not everyone wants a specialty pistol, but if you want to say you are long range shooting with a handgun, you can get to 1,000yrds with a specialty pistol without much work, whereas 300yrds with a revolver takes some doing. Another "easy entry" into long range revolver shooting is the X-Frame in 460. It's a ton of recoil, which is terrible for new shooters and detrimental for precision, even for an experienced shooter, but the cartridge is fast and flat shooting, and the long barreled X frames are readily scoped and made to be fired from the bench.
Personally: my favorite long range revolver is a 7.5" Ruger Redhawk in 357/44 B&D Magnum. It's a 44mag case necked down to 357. I shoot drawn 180grn rifle bullets at 1900fps, without the pressure indicators I see with conventional 158grn revolver bullets at even lower speeds. I drilled & tapped the topstrap to accept a wiegand picatinny rail, and go back and forth between a Leupold VX3 2-8x handgun scope and a VX3i 4.5-14x rifle scope. I did an action job to improve my trigger feel and reduce trigger weight, and have custom grips (new version coming soon!) to make it more bench friendly. I'd spent a couple decades and thousands upon thousands of dollars working through various cartridges to get here - a round with low enough recoil, high enough velocity, sufficient ballistic coefficient, and sufficient power down range to accomplish my desire.
Chris Rhodes at Bayside Custom Gunworks also builds a "FrankenRuger," which is a rebarreled GP100 with a free floating lug and custom barrel to be fired from the bench. Relatively speaking, it's pretty affordable, and with hot 357mag loads, Ernie Bishop (
@xphunter) has been doing some impressive long range shooting, in excess of 500yrds even. Something to consider if you're looking to get serious about long range revolver shooting.
Like I said - don't convince yourself "long" range revolver shooting is anything it isn't. Other than wind and elevation correction, it's no different than shooting short - and the wind isn't so challenging at only 300yrds.
