You Can’t Really Make This Shot

I did it again. I provoked white-hot rage on an Internet forum.

I asked a shooting question. I asked whether I was wrong to doubt people who said they could shoot squirrels in the head, killing them cleanly, with an ordinary .22 rifle, shooting from the shoulder, unsupported, CONSISTENTLY, from 100 feet. I said I thought anyone who made that claim was either lying or letting pride overcome memory.

Boy, did people get mad. One actually cursed at me. And I was polite the whole time!

Men popped up, telling me I was a bad shot and insisting they could do it.

I still say they’re, well, wrong, to be nice. And I’m not a bad shot.

I have shot a number of squirrels near my house in order to protect my trees and plants. What I found was that a .22 head shot couldn’t be trusted to drop a squirrel, and I also found that making such shots over about 50 feet, offhand, was very hard. This is why I force myself to use the shotgun now. With a 16 gauge and #6 shot, it’s hard to miss within 100 feet, unless the squirrel acts up. Which they do.

On one occasion, I made a nice .22 shot on a squirrel and hit it in the head. I thought I had missed, because it ran off. The next day, I shot it again. I didn’t know it was the same squirrel. It was trying to feed. When I picked it up, I saw part of the front of its head was gone. I had shot it off the day before. You would think the shock of a .22 slug hitting a squirrel’s face would knock it out, but no such luck.

I put a three-target spinner setup in my yard, 100 feet from my bedroom door. I measured the distance with a tape. When I used a scoped gun and aimed at a target about as wide as a squirrel brain, I found the crosshairs wobbled about 2″ no matter what I did. Sitting down, I would have had a much steadier picture, but standing up, I knew I would be doing well to hit a squirrel at all, let alone put one through its brain.

Allowing for the fact that a better amateur shot might be able to cut the wobble to 1″, I still concluded it wasn’t possible to make the shot reliably. A squirrel’s brain, from the side, is about 1-1/4″ by 1/3″. It’s like shooting at half of a ping pong ball.

A good mall-grade .22 with mall-grade ammo will shoot into about a 1/2″ circle at 100 feet, with an occasional bad round outside the circle. I mean it will do this when glued to a bench, not when held at the shoulder. Add the size of the target, the inherent wobbliness of offhand shooting, and the inaccuracy of rimfire ammunition, and you get a circle bigger than a squirrel’s brain.

I just don’t buy it. With a more accurate rifle, like a 6.5 Creedmoor, surely there must be a few non-professional shooters who can do it. There are plenty of rifles that will shoot into an area only slightly larger than the size of their bores at 100 feet, but a Walmart .22 with Walmart ammo won’t do that.

Hitting a squirrel brain consistently at 100 feet is a little harder than hitting half a TUMS tablet at 33 feet. That’s not easy!

After reading some angry responses, I went to Youtube to see what a truly good shooter can do offhand with a .22. I checked out Paul Harrell. He’s a champion marksman. He produced a video in which he covered a folding table with some of his awards. One person couldn’t carry them all.

In another video, he shot three .22 rifles offhand at 75 feet, producing three groups. Every group was too big to guarantee a dead squirrel with every shot. Every single group. And 75 is smaller than 100, right?

I thought he shot very well, and he wasn’t ashamed to post the video, so he must have been satisfied, too. So if he can’t hit squirrel brains at 75 feet, how can some guy with a Rural King hat and a mouthful of Skoal do it over and over at 100? I don’t think he can.

Here’s my arbitrary standard for an easy shot on an animal: you should be able to kill the animal cleanly 98 times out of 100. No less. If you can’t make a shot 98% of the time, it’s not an easy shot.

Here’s what I think of as an easy shot on a paper target: a random mall-grade pistol with cheap FMJ at 25 feet, shooting offhand into a 4″ circle. I can do that all day, and unlike most men who say they can make a shot all day, I am serious. I will very rarely miss. If I miss, it means I did something unusual or I got a bad cartridge. At 2″, I will still succeed the vast majority of the time, but not 98%. At 1″, I will probably be at about 85%. That’s not an easy shot. The 98% shot is easy. If you’re not surprised when you miss a shot, it wasn’t an easy shot. If you’re stunned, it was easy.

For someone better than me, or someone with better stuff, the “easy circle” will be smaller. For others, such as most police officers, it will be a lot bigger.

I don’t know why men let their insecurity make them lie about unimportant things. A long time ago, I learned that most 6-foot-tall men are really 5’10” or less. Sylvester Stallone and Robert Redford are both legitimately short, and Burt Reynolds was inches shorter than the 6’1″ he claimed.

Here’s something I love hearing: “I’m 6’1″ in boots.” Okay! And I’m 29,038′, standing on Mount Everest!

Men lie about their strenght. They’ll say they bench-press x pounds when the number is really 0.75x. I used to work out with 300 pounds, lifting it 8 times slowly, pulling it back all the way to my chest. But when I mentioned it to people, I always said this: “on a machine.” Free weights? Forget it. I found 220 unpleasant. I was honest with people. Machines make lifting easy.

Men lie about their height and their athletic abilty, and they are the same way about shooting.

I remember a funny example of insecurity-related fibbing. When I was a kid, I had the fastest car in school. It was not very fast, but it was the fastest. It was a Z28 with a 3.73 rear, positraction, and a 4-speed transmission. It was on the high end of the Camaro spectrum. Still your hearts, ladies. A guy named Jake Stryker (not really) had a base-model Firebird. He put some fat tires on it and claimed the dealership had worked some kind of wizardry on the motor, which wasn’t true. Dealerships didn’t do that.

He said he feared his younger brother would take it out and drive it at 140 miles per hour, which was considerably faster than a Corvette at that time. To make a Firebird do 140, you had to drop it out of a plane and put rockets on it.

Everyone knew he was lying, and there were jokes, but no one said anything to him, because they knew how he was. It was important to Jake to convince me and other kids his car was faster than mine. If his dad had really wanted him to have a fast car, he would have bought him a Trans Am with a 400-cubic-inch motor, a manual transmission, and 3.56 gears. He wouldn’t have paid a dealer to upgrade a base car, spending more than a Trans Am would have cost in the first place. Hello?

The Trans Am, Pontiac’s best Firebird, had thick sway bars, the big engine and manual transmission, the low gearing, and probably a few other things, from the factory. Putting all that junk in a baby blue girl’s Firebird with factory automatic, like Jake Stryker’s, would have cost a ton.

Back then, bragging about your automatic-transmission Firebird was pretty silly. They were all slow, and nobody who wanted to go fast drove automatics in those days. That reminds me of another Firebird driver I knew. I knew a girl named Kate, and she had a Formula, which was just below the Trans Am. I expressed shock because she got an automatic. She said she didn’t like the manual because it had three pedals. She didn’t know what they did. Wow. Hilarious.

Kate was not a car person. She picked her car because it, like Jake Stryker’s, was baby blue. Really nice girl.

I was not a cocky kid, and I didn’t go around bragging about my car. I didn’t race. I didn’t do anything to get Jake going. That was all him. People used to make fun of him a lot, but they didn’t tell him. It was very strange. He ran with the cool kids and thought he was one of them. They let him think that.

Some total strangers are pretty mad at me right now, for no reason at all. Oh, well. I still think a .22 brain shot on a squirrel at 100 feet is hard for nearly everyone, if not everyone. Too hard to be close to a sure thing. Anyone who wants to change my mind can put up a target 1-1/4″ long by 1/3″ high, shaped like a squirrel brain, shoot it 100 times in a row, and put it on Youtube. No editing.

I don’t see that happening.

In case anyone wants to try, remember:

1. Regular .22; nothing you can’t buy at a mall.
2. From the shoulder, no support at all.
3. Regular ammo, like Mini-mags.
4. Squirrel-brain-shaped target.
5. One hundred feet, measured on camera.
6. No cuts in the video.
7. Amateur shooter, not including people who used to be pros.
8. One hundred shots with at least 98 hits.

If you pull it off, here is the prize I offer: nothing. I will definitely say I’m impressed, though.