Opening a can of worms: What is GOOD Accuracy?

[priv8ter]

I have a confession to make. I don't know what size groups I shoot with my guns.

Oh, I could pull out a ruler(or a Leatherman) and measure them, but the numbers don't really mean much to me. I tend to think more in terms of target vital area, or Minute-of-Bad Guy accuracy.

While growing up, both my rifles had scopes, and I never really learned how to use iron sights. All I was worried about with my 7mm Magnum was that my bullets hit within about 4 inches of where I was aiming. I considered that good enough for mule deer and elk. Being a high school kid, and 7mm Rem Mag costing what it did, I was unlikely to shoot more than every other month anyway.

In the last 4 months though, I have gotten and 1894C, and a Saiga 7.62 X 39. I have plans to get a Garand for my birthday. None of these guns come with scopes.

Welcome to the challenging world of open sights.

What I am wondering is, now that I am growing up, and hopefully getting to shoot more, what kind of accuracy should I expect from myself? The Marlin and the Saiga are both carbines, 16" barrels. So far, my 50 yard shooting with them is decent...2-3" groups. At 100 yards...well...back to that 'Minute-of-Torso' stuff.

Now, once I get my Garand, with a nice long barrel, I would think from a rest(with practice!) I should be able to get 2-3" groups at a 100 yards, right?

What kind of accuracy do you folks expect to see from a casual shooter, someone who can make it to the range every 6 weeks or so, for a couple of boxes of amm0?

Thanks!

greg

 

[Mulliga]

I'm in the same boat, though I have even less experience than you do.

Hell, my Yugo SKS groups 6" at 50 yards. But I suspect that's mostly me .

I can do 1.25" at 50 yards with a custom scoped suppressed 10/22 a kind gentleman let me try out.

Bottom line: you're doing fine . From everything I've heard, 2" at 100 yards with a Garand or a Saiga is pretty decent shooting, so I guess that's the goal.

 

[Beetle Bailey]

For your question, I think everyone is different. Buddy's GF makes it out to the range about once every two months but with a scoped Savage 10FP she shoots MOA all day. Me, I have shot every week for the past several months but would have trouble matching her. My advice would be:

1. Keep measuring your groups and keep track of them. That way you can measure your progress and being conscious of it can make you strive to get consistantly better.

2. Try to pick up a .22lr with iron sights. Plenty of practice for skill building.

3. Different guns like different kinds of ammo (another reason to get the .22lr - easy to experiment with wide variety of ammo) and your group size can vary depending on the ammo.

HTH and let us know when you get and shoot the Garand (p.s. careful with Garand Thumb ).

 

[Archie]

Sounds like a cop out, but....

It depends on what you're doing.

To score a possible (maximum score) on the NRA National Match Course for Rifle, you need a rifle that will group under 3 MOA. That's the size of the 10 ring at ALL distances.

As you have established, priv, the requirements for deer hunting is "minute of buck" at whatever range you find said buck.

For common plinking, minute of sodapop can does very nicely.

For defending the homestead or the republic, a battle rifle must reliably connect with one of the unholy to whatever distance you can take shots. Naturally, if you live in the Great Plains area of Nebraska or Kansas, that may be further than the Okeefenokee Swamp area.

Now... for bragging.... one minute of angle is the promised land, so to speak. But this depends, too. One MOA for a Remington 700 VLS with a tuned trigger and bells/whistles in caliber .22-250 is somewhat mediocre. One can't really brag about accuracy until it gets down to the .400" or .250" range. On the other hand, for a SKS or Winchester 94 to shoot consistent 1 MOA groups is rather impressive.

So... what do you want to do? Accomplish something, or impress someone else? In this context, both are acceptable.

 

[SteelyDan]

Others can answer more authoritatively than I, but I can tell you what I look for.

In a scoped hunting rifle with decent-but-not-great ammo (say, Federal Classic or Rem green and yellow box) and a decent-but-not-great rest (say one sandbag for the front rest), I look for 2-inch 5-shot groups at 100 yards. Lots of times I can't do quite that well (my old eyes suck), but there are also more than a few shining moments when I've done even better, a couple times much better.

With iron sights on a variety of rifles (.45-70, SAR, AK-47, SKS, AR-15, 10/22), I look for 6" groups at 100 yards (the little pie plate thing), and I usually get and exceed them. The .45-70 and AR, especially, have given me some groups that were barely over 3 inches.

I'm well aware that many folks here can shoot rings around me, but that's what I'm happy with.

 

[TimRB]

Dunno if it will help, but I'll tell my story anyway...

I took 4-5 different kinds of ammo and three 22s out to the range once to see once and for all which ammo shot best in which rifle. Two of the rifles had open sights, and the third had aperture.

To make a long story short, I mostly found out that I now shoot much better with aperture sights than open. With open sights, when I focus on the front sight, the rear sight is too fuzzy to get good groups. When I look through the peephole of the aperture, however, everything, including the target, sharpens up.

For this reason I am installing a tang sight on my 22 lever. Ironically, when I look through this sight, I can see the open sights, front and rear, plain as day.

Tim

 

[DMK]

1. Keep measuring your groups and keep track of them. That way you can measure your progress and being conscious of it can make you strive to get consistantly better.

Excellent advice IMO.

I used to strive for MOA (1" groups at 100 yards), but then realized that I was probably wasting my time and money. I'm not even sure my collection of surplus and battle rifles is even capable of that level of accuracy.

The best thing to strive for is consistancy. Find out what the best you and the rifle can do from a bench. That's your benchmark. Now try it prone, sitting and standing. Keep your targets. Date them, list the ammo, rifle and weather conditions. Refer to them periodically to see your progress over time.

If you can reliably shoot 4" groups @100 yards, standing with open sights any time you pick up your rifle, you're doing quite well. If sometimes you shoot 2" groups, sometimes you shoot 4" groups, then obviously, you and the rifle can shoot 2", you just need some more work to do it all the time.

2. Try to pick up a .22lr with iron sights. Plenty of practice for skill building.

Also excellent advice. Don't discout the benefits of practicing with an open sighted .22 even at close range like 25 yards or so. I sometimes get tired on squinting to see the target all the way out there at 100. Instead of going to a scoped rifle, sometimes I just use a .22 with smaller targets at closer range. I've even found that I can do this against the hill in my back yard using subsonic ammo so I don't annoy my neighbors. This allows me to get some shooting in every weekend as long as the weather allows.


That's my two cent advice.

 

[artherd]

A really good rifle will shoot MOA if the shooter is capable. (Usually I can't hold 'em that well honestly. Even with sandbags and/or bipod.)

A really fantastic rifle will be 1/2-MOA or less at 600yds.

Battle rifle in the 2-3MOA range will still save your life quite dandily.

Heck, so will 6-10MOA if 'they' get close.

 

[Mikul]

If you can get 4 inches at 100 yards, you have a usable rifle. I would fix or sell anything that will not perform that well.

Most surplus rifles will shoot 2 inch groups at 100 yards with the right ammo. Just because you Saiga is giving you 6 inch groups with cheap surplus ammo, is no reason to throw it out. Buy some match quality ammo of different bullet weights. That should show you what your rifle CAN do. I don't imagine that you'd want to run Federal Gold Medal Match through a Saiga all of the time, but you may be independantly wealthy.

You have to define what you expect from a rifle. If I can't aim at a deer's eye at 400 yards and have a reasonable chance at turning him in to Stevie Wonder, I'm not happy. If all you want is a lung shot, your 4" grouping rifle is just fine out to 200 yards. Of course, if you want to take a lung shot at 400 yards, you're taking a very risky shot.

 

[uglygun]

I'm a varmint shooter so I'm generally looking for accuracy that will be MOS or "Minute of Squirrel" out to around 400-500 yards for my accurate rifles.


The 300WinMag and my accurized AR15 are both capable of this and I strive to be able to shoot them well at distances of 400-500 yards on demand. Beyond 500 and it gets into the realm of me being happy to just hit a dinner plate sized target for 3 or 4 out of 5 shots, or maybe even less depending on just how far we are talking.


For my other rifles that are mostly blasters with iron sights or dot type optics, I'm looking for somewhere in the neighborhood of 2MOA where the majority of misses on larger sized targets will largely be the fault of the shooter and not the rifle.

 

[Skofnung]

I get ~2moa at 100 yards with my A2 sighted Bushmaster using surplus ammo and a front sandbag. I have never used "good" bullets in this gun, so I can't say that is as good as it gets. Offhand, I get ~ 5moa at 100 yards.

My other (centerfire) rifles with "buckhorn" or "open" sights, I get ~3 or 4 moa.

I do not have a scoped centerfire rifle.

I figure that for most situations, this is good enough, but I still need to get out and practice more. As do we all.

 

[Grump]

At medium and long ranges, the NRA 10-rings are 2 MOA, not 3. To get your 12-inch group at 600 yards, you and your rifle must typically do no worse than 1.5 MOA at 100 or 200 yards (IME, those two distances are often interchangeable in MOAs--the cone of dispersion often stays linear out that far).

Never forget the ammo factor. Whenever you hit any benched/prone with sling group size plateau under 2 MOA and your averages are staying the same, try some different/better ammo for at least 5, 5-shot grups and preferably over several shooting sessions.

For your more careful shooting under ideal circumstances, you *can* wind up shooting better than some ammo, and even better than the gun, if it won't do less than 1 MOA with any skilled shooter you can borrow, with any high quality ammo.

 

[El Tejon]

5" at 200.

Anything better is a bonus!

 

[KaceCoyote]

anywhere from 6-7 MOA @100yards standing and slung. About 2-3 moa sitting. 2-2.5 prone and about a 1.8-2" from just a hard front block. I put the majority of my shooting downrange while standing, which is how I take deer or other small defenceless woodland creatures. If its just a fun gun shoot however you feel the most comfortable, if your a hunter or competitor of somesort train like -crazy- in the positions you expect to enguage and add another 15-20 yards ontop of that.

I try and put my .30-30 to use at -about- 75-80 yards so I train at 100 yards. If you try it standing, you should try and try different boots and shoes. I have these israeli boots that're very flexible, hardly any reinforcement. I shoot with these for, well I dunno maybe its a Placebo but it sure helps me.

 

[tex_n_cal]

How about "better than average"

If I had a revolver that would shoot 2 MOA, I'd be pretty darn happy. I'd be pretty annoyed with a heavy barreled .223 that wouldn't do any better.

I have:

a 1896 .30-40 Krag that has done 1.5 MOA with open sights
3 Ruger #1's that will shoot 1/2 MOA with three shots
an XP100 in .22-250 that will hold 1/2 MOA all day long
a High Wall .25-06 that easily beats 1/2 MOA
a M99 Savage that will easily beat 1 MOA with 3 shots
a .351 Win SL that goes about 10 MOA
a .500-450 #1 Express that goes about 6 MOA until the barrel leads up and then it's about 12 MOA

...and everything in-between. Most of my guns I'm happy about their accuracy - the ones that aren't either become project, or get sold. Only accurate rifles are interesting, as Whelan said.

 

[444]

I almost never benchrest my rifles. In fact, very few of them have seen a benchrest. I also don't have any of the proper gear for benchrest shooting. The best I do usually is to shoot off the passesger side rear fender of my pickup with my leg braced against the tire. I don't shoot any wallhanger groups this way, but I can shoot a good enough group to see where my sights are set. I am far more interested in how good I can shoot from field positions than I am in how tight a group I can shoot. If I had the right stuff, I would do more bench shooting just for the heck of it, but there is always something else to spend my money on.
So, to answer your question, if I can shoot a group of less than 4" off my pickup fender, that is good enough. With one of my hunting rifles and a scope I usualy do much better than that. With iron sights an exceptional group might be 3" with the norm out to 4"-5".

 

[hps1]

With open sights, when I focus on the front sight, the rear sight is too fuzzy to get good groups. When I look through the peephole of the aperture, however, everything, including the target, sharpens up.

Tim: Those of us over 40 fully understand the difficulty of seeing iron sights, especially the open rear sight variety. Aperature sights are much better, as you stated.

If you
really want to sharpen up the front sight and target, get a Merit disc for your aperature sight. This is a device that has an iris adjustment much like a camera lense uses to focus. The opening can be adjusted for the sharpest sight picture and will really tighten your groups. The downside of closing down the aperature is that you must have lots of light......they are not too good for a hunting rifle that will probably be fired more at dawn or dusk.

My target rifles all have apreature rear sights with the merit discs + aperature front sights. By choosing the right front aperature to sharpen up the target image and then adjusting the merit for a sharp front sight, these rifles will shoot 1.25 MOA groups if I do my part. To hit the target, you must first be able to see it and the sights clearly. Proper aperature size will vary with the available light at a given time.

Regards,
hps