Improbable Aiming Skills/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Improbable Aiming Skills in Real Life include:

  • Real World Examples: A number of competition and professional shooters, over a number of decades, have performed incredible feats of gunplay. These include:
    • going from a standing rest position to drawing and firing an killing headshot in 0.26 timed seconds—and being even faster than that, being able to throw a handful of eight clay pigeons behind them and promptly shoot all of them in the air with a shotgun,
    • setting up two targets and using a sword in between and in front of them to cut the bullet and strike both targets accurately,
    • being able to fire sixty rounds from ten revolvers and put every shot into a four inch circle in 17 seconds?picking up and putting down each revolver in succession,
    • firing eight rounds from a revolver in 1.00 timed seconds (480rpm -- matching a machinegun's rate of fire!) with all rounds hitting the target,
    • and many, many more.
  • It should also be pointed out that these shooters practice daily, going through tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition per year, and are the absolute top masters of their respective field at an Olympic level of skill. Look up folks like Bill Munden, Ed Cantrell, Elmer Keith, Jerry Miculek, or Rob Leatham for starts...or, for that matter, Annie Oakley.
    • The Discovery Channel series Time Warp aired an episode titled "Sharpshooter", which featured (among others) super-slow motion photography of a professional rifle shot shooting at and hitting an ordinary playing card edge on! Granted, it took him a couple shots before he hit the card, but the feat seems to be at least in the running for being a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
      • Although it looks very impressive hitting a playing card edge-on is only slightly more difficult than hitting the bullseye normally, because the effective target area to hit the card is a circle slightly less than twice the diameter of the bullet. (i.e., even if the bullet just grazes the card along its side the card is still getting cut in half).
  • Ed McGivern was the living embodiment of this trope. In addition to five shots at five yards into a silver dollar in 45/100ths of a second (with a stock DA revolver), he could shoot six hand-thrown clays, centerpunch washers, fire revolvers akimbo at separate targets with equal effectiveness, and score hits at 600 yards (again, with a stock revolver). In one chapter of his book, he says (paraphrased), "anyone can do this. I pulled it off by standing in a field in Montana and burning up 30,000 rounds to master this one trick (shooting aerial targets)."
  • Getting away from handguns and shotguns, three notable sniper shots: the legendary Carlos Hathcock, 2,286 meters, the current record set by Rob Furlong, 2,430 meters. The difficulty of these long ranges is pointed out by the facts like Furlong's shot, at a moving target, took 4 seconds to go from the gun and had a bullet drop of about 146 feet. Beating even that was Royal Marine Matt Hughes. Although his shot at an Iraqi sentry was a relatively short 860 meters, the gale-force crosswind meant his bullet curved 56 feet sideways.
    • Simo Häyhä. Of particular note is that Häyhä did all of his work without a scope. Yeah. The greatest sniper in history killed 546 Soviet soldiers using only iron sights. He may not have matched other snipers in sheer range, but you have got to respect a sniper so skilled he hunted with only a pair of very fine-tuned bits of metal telling him where his shots were going to go.
      • He was eventually presented with a higher-quality rifle, but removed the scope because 1. the shine off the lens could give away his position to enemy snipers and 2. he didn't need it, as noted above.
    • Rifleman Thomas Plunket. In 1809, using a black powder rifle over an open sight, he shot a French general dead at a range of 500 meters. Then he shot the first man to come to the general's aid, just to prove it wasn't a lucky shot.
    • Billy Dixon. He and a group of Bison hunters were defending the settlement of Adobe Walls from Comanches. Dixon, armed with a Sharps rifle, knocked a Comanche off his horse at a surveyed range of 1,538 yards.
      • Even as Billy Dixon was (most possibly) one of the best long-range riflemen in the entire world, he did not give much credit to his shot and did not attempt to duplicate it.
    • Military snipers in general. US Army snipers average one confirmed kill for every 1.78 bullets fired. Add in the probable kills, and the accuracy goes up to one kill for every 1.32 bullets fired.
    • Rob Furlong's record is actually now a former record. The new record holder is Craig Harrison, who not only hit a target over 8,000 feet away with a rifle designed to have an effective distance of 5,000 feet, but decided that wasn't badass enough and did it twice.
      • Not reported in that link is that with his third shot, Corporal Harrison disabled the machine gun his victims were using. As they say in America, three up, three down.
  • In 2005 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, a patrol was on a rooftop in the eastern part of the city scouting out sniper positions. A member of the patrol was killed by a terrorist sniper from the city hospital, over half a mile away. An impressive enough shot, but the Army sniper, SSG James Gilliland, with the patrol was better. Within seconds of the shot, he turned, acquired the terrorist's position, and returned fire, killing him with one shot. A within-seconds snap-shot kill at over 1,000 meters. Not to mention he somehow found the spot the bad guy was firing from amongst the many windows of the hospital.
    • He even made Wikipedia, as the 7th longest sniper kill in history, and more interestingly, the longest sniper kill made with 7.62mm ammunition, a fairly "typical" round, rather than the .50 caliber anti-material round, or specially designed for extreme range sniping .338 Lapua Magnum.
  • Not that shooting guns out of people's hands can't be done, but it's just too Awesome but Impractical to use.
    • The comment of the guy who'd just had the gun shot out of his hand as the police wrestled him to the ground? "That was a great shot!"
  • During an eight hour battle between US Marines and Taliban fighters, a Marine marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn't miss any shots, despite the enemies' rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
    • Did we mention he went 1 for 1? 20 shots and 20 kills.
  • The memoir Sniper One tells of the exploits of a UK sniper platoon in Al-Amarah, one of the most dangerous, and least-known, battlefield cities in the Iraq War. They have a number of feats such as these. Expecially when they get their hands, briefly, on a .50 calibre anti-tank rifle.
    • Anti-tank rifle? The only place you're likely to find an anti-tank rifle is in a museum, since they went out of style in the early years of World War II.
  • The Beanshooter Man, who performs this trope with a slingshot of all things.
  • In the 17th century the kickass soldier/scientist/artist/bucaneer Prince Rupert Of The Rhine shot a hole through a weathervane from 200 yards using a flintlock pistol. When King Charles I, who was watching, claimed it was a fluke, he did it again. The weathervane was still in place, with its two musket holes, 200 years later.
  • In the vein of Simo Hayha above, in WWI a brigade American Marines engaged a German division at Belleau Wood, sniping targets at up to 800 yards (which is far enough you don't hear the rifle's report before the bullet) with iron sights. The fire was so devastating the German commanders thought the Americans had machine guns.
    • A similar feat has been attributed to a British rifle platoon at a bridge in 1914. The British trained specifically for this pre-war with the "Mad Minute" training exercise in which riflemen had to put at least 15 aimed shots into a target 300 yards away within 60 seconds.
  • Gather 'round, tropers, and hear the tale of the man who made .50 calibre sniping popular. Carlos Norman Hathcock II, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC had 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam ("confirmed" meaning an officer-rank third party actually saw the dead body). He scared the NVA so much they put a $30,000 bounty on his head. He sometimes used the Browning M2 machine gun with a custom-mounted scope to make shots at over 2500 yards. That's right, this man sniped with a machine gun. He even disabled a child gun-runner by shooting his bike—but then the little punk got up and started shooting, so Hathcock had to shoot him. Also, one of his confirmed kills was an actual Scope Snipe.
  • British hunter and explorer Walter D.M. "Karamojo" Bell shot a bit over 1500 African elephants during his career, with 7x57mm, 6.5x54mm and .303 rifles. Most of his kills were brain shots from the first bullet. All of them with military-type full metal jacket bullets. He never used any sort of expanding bullet and appeared rather disinterested in large-caliber "elephant guns". (Modern "men" are rather scared when it comes to hunt a bear with a .303, 7.92x57mm, .30-06 or anything that does not look like a cannon).
  • Dersu Uzala Arseniev is about one native friend whom he met while exploring Far East. The protagonist shoots so ridiculously well, done in a fiction, this would make eyebrows rise, but it's a memoir. A typical example: two of his men on rest tried to shoot a duck, missed, it flied a bit away and this somehow turned into sport, until it was at least 300 steps away by the author's estimation. Enters giggling drunk Dersu. "Your shot well. Now my want chase duck." He raises the gun and fires almost without aiming. The bullet hits water, its splash showers the bird. It squeaks in panic and flies farther. Next shot—another close hit. Now most of them have to use binoculars. One tried to compete and shot. The ricochet made the bird dive for a moment, but that's all. Dersu aims carefully—yet another very close hit. The duck flies away for good.
  • U.S. Army Corporal Alvin York. When his unit was spotted by a German machine gun company and his entire squad either had been cut down or had fled to cover except him, he stood and took the concentrated fire of thirty-two German machine guns and over 100 German riflemen without receiving so much as a scratch on him. But this trope comes into play for his offensive capability: With only his semi-automatic rifle and Colt .45 pistol, he shot 28 Germans and forced them to surrender to him alone - and according to all accounts, he didn't miss one single shot.

York: I jes couldn't miss a German's head or body at that distance. And I didn't. Besides, it weren't no time to miss nohow.
Official report of the battle: The American [York] fired all of the rifle ammunition clips on the front of his belt and then three complete clips from his automatic pistol. In days past he won many a turkey shoot in the Tennessee mountains, and it is believed that he wasted no ammunition on this day.

    • York's aim was so spectacular, when a group of six German soldiers fixed bayonets and charged him, York took out his pistol and shot them all back to front, so the ones in front would not know their fellows were dying until too late. Again, without missing a shot. York believed that God protected him and guided him, which given what he accomplished doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
    • The machine guns fired from camouflaged positions; York couldn't see any of the men crewing them. But he saw the gun muzzles, and he knew where the gunners' heads had to be relative to those.
  • Corporal Olaf Lagus, the son of General Ruben Lagus, in the Finnish Army, Continuation War in 1944. He was a Sturmgeschutz III gunner, and just assigned to combat duty. He shot a total of four rounds in the war (before he was wounded in action and hospitalized), and with each round he destroyed a Soviet T-34. His efficiency was full 100%.
  • Lieutenant Antti Tani, Finnish Air Force. He destroyed a Soviet Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik - a heavily armoured ground attack plane dubbed as "flying tank" in 1944 with just one single round before the guns of his Messerschmitt Bf 190G jammed. An electric failure had jammed the trigger mechanism after the gun shooting just once.
  • A famous example on the reverse side of this: Union General John Sedgwick, at the start of the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in July 1864, complained as his staff and artillery ducked for cover from snipers about 1000 yards away, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Seconds later he was killed by a bullet just below his left eye.
    • Some would say that Death by Irony and Tempting Fate were invoked in full effect here; it certainly makes his death a funny story to tell in history class. What was sad about it, though, is that he wasn't a bad General, or a bad man, period; he was just trying to encourage his troops, and was cut down rather ghoulishly with the Union being so close to victory. Still, one does have to admit that this story is an effective tale illustrating the importance of a sniper:
      • 1) If he can pick off important military personnel, then he can affect the outcome of a battle by upsetting the chain of command and the morale of the enemy.
      • 2) He can pin down the enemy and severely impede their advance.
      • 3) Lastly, snipers are messengers of death from long range. For perspective, 1000 yards is about 3000 feet and extremely impressive for a Civil War era rifle—very little hope of counter-acting that.
  • Lieutenant James Launders DSO* DSC* commanding His Majesty's Submarine Venturer. Not only did he sink the U-864, he did so using a three dimensional firing solution he worked out on paper as both submarines were submerged at the time. This is the only time in history that one submarine sank another while both were submerged.
  • The world record for benchrest shooting (custom guns firing custom bullets) is a 1.2 cm group of five shots at 300 yards, an area a fraction the size of a AA battery.
  • Subversion. The French politician Clemenceau was a quarrelsome fellow and regularly getting challenges. However his opponents always chose a pistol rather than a sword. Clemenceau was good with both. But he did not trust himself to aim a pistol well enough to wound a man without killing, and he was confident enough that he could just cut up someone to teach them a lesson with a sword. Thus anyone who took him on wanted to make sure they were unharmed by taking advantage of his restraint (or of the fact that being a manslayer led to complications he preferred to avoid).
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Improbable_Aiming_Skills/Real_Life?oldid=2032450"