preparedness

Marksmanship Tips: How To Shoot Like A Pro

While the basic concept of shooting is easy to understand, many find that they struggle to maintain accurate groupings even under easy shooting conditions. When you are facing an urban survival scenario, you may not have the luxury of a missed shot.

In this article, we will go over the 5 main shooting principles taught to both the U.S. Army Snipers and United States Marines, to make you a better marksman. If you adhere to these basic principles and spend time practicing in a variety of terrain and atmospheric conditions, you will be capable of taking controlled and accurate shots no matter what situation you find yourself in. This can be the difference between life and death.

1. Solid Shooting Position

The first rule to shooting true is to have a stable firing position. A correct shooting position is a combination of holding the rifle correctly and positioning your body correctly for your terrain and situation. There are various ways to stand, sit, and kneel while shooting as well as competing theories for how best to hold the rifle.

In the end, what you are trying to achieve is a steady and relatively comfortable position that allows you to fire accurately, make use of your available cover, and will enable you to move quickly if need be.

It comes down to hand positioning and body positioning:

Familiarize yourself with the various hand positions and decide through training which works better for you.
Your body positioning will depend on your situation, and you should get familiar with shooting from all positions.

Basic Rifle Shooting Positions

There are four basic positions for shooting rifles or carbines. Obviously, it is impossible to encompass and name every possibility*. These are just the most basic stances you will want to practice.

*Snipers have something like 12 variations of the prone.

Standing: This is simply shooting while standing. Either in a long-range marksmanship stance or in a combat-ready stance. This is the least stable position, provides the least concealment, but allows you maximum mobility.

Standing Unsupported or Off-Hand Position

Kneeling: This is most commonly done with one knee down and one knee up, often with the support arm resting in the meat of the leg for added stability. This support provides more stability, in turn more accurate fire, and is a nice compromise between mobility, accuracy, and a small silhouette.
Sitting: Sitting on the ground, either ‘open legged’ or ‘cross-legged’ with your elbows resting on the meat of the legs for stability. Another compromise between mobility, stability, and silhouette size. Sitting is often used when firing downhill or in awkward terrain.

Sling-Supported Sitting Position

The Prone: This is what you call lying down on your stomach. The feet are usually slightly bent to provide added stability. This is the most stable and accurate firing position but is also the slowest to move out of.

Tips for Creating a Solid Firing Position:

Relax: You should be able to relax when in the correct position. Your bone structure should naturally support your firing position — muscle tension will cause shaking and muscle fatigue, killing your accuracy. Neck should be relaxed, and cheek should rest naturally on the weapon stock.
Rifle Butt Placement: Should be firm and high in the shoulder. Snugness will reduce the disparity between the movement of the front sight and rear sight picture. Proper placement of the butt also helps to steady the rifle and lessen recoil.
Avoid Bone On Bone: Your elbow directly on your knee, as an example, is hard to keep still. Put your elbow into the meat of your thigh (for example) and you will have less movement in your position.

Hand Positioning

Firing Hand: Once again, according to the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Sniper Training and Employment Handbook: The shooter should grasp the rifle firmly but not rigidly with the firing hand. Exerting light pressure rearward.

Off-Hand: let the weapon rest in your nonfiring hand. Where exactly you grab will depend on your preference and situation. Longer range shooting is usually done while resting the mid-point of the barrel on your hand. Close-range combat shooting has proponents both for short stocking the rifle as well as for grasping it further down the barrel.

Using Shooting Supports (Walls, Windows, etc.)

These are examples of Nonstandard Supported Positions and/or Field Expedient Weapon Supports Used by Army Snipers:

Foxhole-Support Position: Used primarily in prepared defenses. Sandbags or other material may be used to provide a stable firing platform.
Window-Supported Position: While the window edge can be used to stabilize the weapon for added accuracy, it makes you more conspicuous. Firing from inside a room will conceal your position better.
Bench-Rest Position: Used when firing from a building, a cave, or a deeply shaded area. If you have time, you want to set this up inside the room. You can use a platform or table and chair to set up a comfortable and secure shooting position.

You will run into situations where properly supporting your weapon and getting a stable firing position will rely on common sense and imagination. Practice various support styles and positions – “Train as if in combat to avoid confusion and self-doubt.”

Tripod, Cross Sticks, and Forked Field-Expedient Weapon Support

2. Proper Aiming (Correct Sight Alignment)

Your ‘sight picture’ is the term used to refer to the visual of the alignment of your front and rear sights when aiming in. One of the most common mistakes with inexperienced shooters is that they are not able to always bring the rifle, or their cheek, back to the same exact position each time they aim in and have to re-locate the correct alignment.

More experienced shooters will have the muscle memory that allows them to quickly aim in correctly. Many shooters will put a piece of tape on their buttstock to gauge were their cheek is resting and to assist them in finding the same spot each time.

A small misalignment in your sights can throw your shot way off target. As the Marine Corps Fundamentals of Marksmanship Handbook states: “A correct sight picture will be where the target, front sight post, rear sight and eye position are completely aligned.”

Correct Sign Alignment With Iron Sights

Determining Elevation and Distance

Another aspect of proper aim is ensuring that your sights are set at the proper distance. Having your sights set at 500m will not allow for accurate shots at 200m. While this is a subject all its own, it needs to be said at some point in this article. Get used to judging and determining distance and changing your sights to match.

Most urban combat training involves keeping your sights set to around 200m-300m and training your muscle memory to compensate for this on the fly. You don’t want to be stopping to adjust sights in the midst of a shootout.

As the Marine Corps Fundamentals of Marksmanship Handbook states: “When working with different distances, adjust your aim to the physics of the bullet. 300m is generally aimed at the center of the target.”

3. Breath and Muscle Control

Your breathing causes your chest to rise and expand, causing movement throughout your body. Learning to control and account for your breathing is key to high-level marksmanship.

The principles are simple to understand, but hard to master.

When you are ready to shoot, take a deep breath and exhale about half of it out.
Hold your breath as you compress the trigger.
Release your breath only after you have taken the shot.
If you hold your breath too long, your heartbeat will increase and your weapon accuracy will decrease.
Learn to relax and calm yourself as you take the shot. Heavy breathing from exertion or adrenaline will decrease accuracy.

A Sniper’s Respiratory Pause Before Firing At The Target

If you fire on the inhale, your shot will go high. If you shoot on the exhale, your shot will dip. If you are hitting in an up-down pattern you need to practice your breathing control more. Learn to fire on the pause, the stillness, between breaths.

4. Steady Trigger Pull

Most shooting errors stem from improper trigger pull at some point.

Trigger control is not only the most important fundamental of marksmanship but also the most difficult to master.
– U.S. Army Special Forces Sniper Training and Employment

You must learn to press the trigger with consistent and steady pressure and without anticipating the shot. The goal is to maintain your aim as you pull the trigger and take the shot. This is harder than it sounds.

Many shooters will flinch as they squeeze the trigger, throwing their aim off. New shooters often squeeze the trigger too abruptly and pull on the rifle as they do so. The natural pull of your finger is not straight back, and it takes many shooters a while to figure that out.

If your shots are off in a left or right pattern group, trigger pull may be the culprit.

Snipers are trained in two methods of trigger pull:

Smooth motion/constant pressure trigger pull – “The sniper pulls the trigger with a single, smooth action…This type of trigger control will help prevent flinching, jerking, and bucking the weapon.”
Interrupted trigger pull – The sniper applies pressure to the trigger when the target is in sight alignment. If the target moves off, maintain trigger pressure and wait until sight alignment is regained. Continue this method until the weapon is fired. This technique is often used when standing due to wavering sights around.

Anticipating The Shot

You must try and be surprised each time you take a shot. Many shooters sub-consciously anticipate the shot and will flinch, if only just a little bit, as they shoot. You must train and train to work this out of your system if necessary.

5. Combat/Survival Marksmanship: Break the Rules

You must first learn to master the rules before you can break them. You must break the rules in order to survive. Many techniques like proper sight alignment cannot be properly utilized, nor do they need to be when engaging targets in close quarters and/or urban terrain.

In the Marine Corps Rifle Marksmanship Handbook, they delve into an engagement at around 50 meters (probable for urban or jungle scenarios). They stress that at close range, a target must be engaged quickly and accurately.

Shooters Enter The Room

The closer a target, the less you need to focus on proper sight alignment. At close quarters combat, Marines are trained to point their shoulders at the enemy and to look just over their sights as they fire. This is trained often enough to allow them to be accurate at close range through muscle memory alone. This shows that with enough training, you can become accurate at close ranges without impairing your vision or wasting valuable time by ‘aiming in’.

At close ranges, trigger control should be applied quickly and instantly the moment that sight picture is achieved. Trigger control is applied as sight picture is being acquired.
– Marine Corps Rifle Marksmanship Handbook

Once the first two shots have been fired and you regain the initiative, your weapon should be moved to your shoulder and the tip of the front post used for the follow up shots.
– Marine Corps | Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT)

In the end, you need to practice, practice, and practice some more. Test yourself and see how you perform with different challenges. The more versatile and accurate you can be in a variety of scenarios, the more likely you are to survive an engagement – or come back from a hunt successfully.

Sources Used:

U.S. Marine Corps
- Rifle Marksmanship
- Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT)

U.S. Army
- Special Forces Sniper Training and Employment
- Close Quarters Combat Techniques

All Images Taken from Public Domain Government Publications (Free for Public Use).

preparedness

4 No Cook Meals For Surviving The Pandemic And Food Supply Shortages

When it comes to your food supply, you just can’t risk not having enough. These no cook meals will be a great addition to your food supply planning. Check out the recipes below!

No Cook Meals to Help You Through the Pandemic

As of the writing of this article, there are 20 meat processing plants that have been shut down due to COVID-19 infections. We have been worrying about these types of effects on our food supply for months now, and this is the first real sign of how infections can affect the food supply.

When you walk into a supermarket, you might not see all the choices you had in the past. An empty meat case is a humbling thing for your eyes to fall upon. It’s the shocking realization that the seemingly infinite supply of chickens, pigs, and cows that are butchered for us has begun to run dry!

To deal with this issue, we are going to present four no cook meals that will help you create dinners at home that will feed your family without worrying so much about what’s available, or unavailable, in the meat case.

1. Smashed White Bean, Avocado and Salted Pork Sandwiches

Smashed White Bean, Avocado and Salted Pork Sandwiches | No Cook Meals for Surviving the Pandemic and Food Supply Shortages

As preppers we get beans. There are a bunch of ways to use beans and this a great example of how you can pack a sandwich with great nutrition and protein.

Serving: Makes 4 sandwiches

Ingredients:

Can of White Beans
Olive Oil
1 Avocado
8 Slices of Whole Grain Bread
8 Slices of Salted Pork (Prosciutto, Ham, Virginia Ham)

Instructions:

Begin by draining your beans in a colander then smashing them up in a bowl add a few glugs of olive oil, salt, pepper. This little mix is delicious. If you add some minced rosemary, you can even turn this into a delicious dip.
Pit your avocado and cut it in half and then quarters lengthwise. Leave the skin on.
Lay the bread out on a clean work surface for assembling the sandwiches.
Spread your mashed bean mix onto one side of the bread.
Peel your avocados and slice 1 quarter for each sandwich. Spread slices over the bean spread.
Add a few slices of your pork to over the top of the avocado.
You can finish this sandwich with some lettuces, fresh sprouts, or just eat it as is.

2. Delicious Crab Salad

Canned crab is a protein option that will likely be around through much of this meat crisis. It does have to be kept in refrigeration, but it’s delicious and this chipotle mayo salad is great in the spring and summer.

Ingredients:

1 Can of Crab Meat
1 Bunch of Asparagus
Chipotle Mayo
1 Bunch of Green Onions
1 Bunch of Cilantro

Instructions:

Drain your crab in a colander and set it in the sink.
Slice your asparagus into 1-inch pieces. Throw them into a bowl.
Thinly slice your onions and your cilantro and throw that into the bowl, as well.
Gently toss in the crab meat.
Squirt on enough Chipotle mayo to coat everything and toss gently not to break up the crab meat.
Chill in the fridge and serve.

3. Simple Greek Salad

Simple Greek Salad | No Cook Meals for Surviving the Pandemic and Food Supply Shortages

The combination of simple summer ingredients makes for an incredible quick salad that you could add other proteins, too, if you wanted. These could be canned meats.

Ingredients:

2 Large Tomatoes
1 Cucumber
1 Red Onion
¼ Cup of Feta Cheese
A Few Sprigs of Fresh Mint
½ Cup of Kalamata Olives
Balsamic Dressing

Instructions:

I like to cut the tomatoes in large chunks and have them kind of be the main course in this salad. Peel and slice your cucumber in half. Remove the seeds and either dice or slice in half-moons.
Peel and slice your red onion in half. Julienne your, or thinly slice, your half onion.
Add all these ingredients to a bowl. Finely slice your mint.
Add your olives, crumbled feta, and mint to the bowl and add enough dressing to coat everything.
Stir it up and allow this to chill for at least an hour for the flavors to really blend.

4. Mediterranean Tuna Lettuce Wraps

Mediterranean Tuna Lettuce Wraps | No Cook Meals for Surviving the Pandemic and Food Supply Shortages

Using some similar ingredients and adding a protein like tuna, you can create some delicious lettuce wraps. The key to a good lettuce wrap is to have most of the items around the same size. So, consider that when you are preparing this dish.

Ingredients:

Iceberg or Butter Lettuce
Canned Artichokes
Canned roasted Red peppers
Fresh Cucumber
Feta Cheese
Minced Olives ¼ Cup
2 Cans of Tuna
Green Onions
Basil

Instructions:

Start by peeling all the full leaves from your lettuce. Set them on a plate either cover them with a wet paper towel or put them back into the fridge.
Dice the peppers, artichokes, and cucumbers into cubes. Go no larger than ½ an inch.
Thinly slice your green onions and basil and add them to a bowl with your diced vegetables. Add your loves to this bowl and mix them thoroughly.
Crumble your feta cheese over the mixture.
Drain your tuna thoroughly and then add that to the bowl, as well.
Gently toss this mixture. Try not to break up the tuna and the cheese too much but incorporate it thoroughly.
If you want, you can add some olive oil to the mix or a few glugs of balsamic vinegar. It’s also delicious just how it is.
Scoop a few tablespoons into a lettuce leaf, wrap it up and eat up!

These no cook meals should help lessen the stress you feel when thinking of what to feed your family. If you don’t have the specific ingredients, use your creativity, and use what you have. You might discover a new recipe while you’re at it!

What’s your favorite no cook meal recipe? Please share it with us in the comments section!

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This Article Was First Found at survivallife.com Read The Original Article Here

preparedness

Billionaire Whistle Blower: Wuhan Coronavirus Death Toll Is Over 50,000

Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui recently revealed leaks from Wuhan crematoriums. He claims based on the number of bodies their furnaces are burning, the death toll could be as high as 50,000.

A Chinese billionaire and whistleblower who lives in U.S. exile says Wuhan crematoriums have burned 50,000 coronavirus victims. | Credit: Chinatopix via AP

The official coronavirus death toll in China is a little over 800. But an exiled Chinese businessman says crematoriums are leaking the real figure.
A billionaire whistleblower alleges Wuhan has crematoriums working 24/7. He claims they’ve cremated some 50,000 coronavirus victims.
Guo Wengui is a Chinese billionaire living in exile in the United States.

The official coronavirus death toll is some 800 people in China. The current official death toll worldwide, outside of China, is 774. But a Chinese billionaire with a history of blowing the whistle on his former government says the real figure is much higher.

Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui recently revealed leaks from Wuhan crematoriums. He claims based on the number of bodies their furnaces are burning, the death toll could be as high as 50,000. Wengui made the bombshell allegations in an interview with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Whistleblower: 1.5 Million Coronavirus Cases In China, 50,000 Coronavirus Deaths In Wuhan

He also claims to have inside information that there are 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases in China. Wengui is emphatic that these are not merely quarantined or “under observation” but confirmed cases of coronavirus infection:

China has struggled to contain the coronavirus. But it has also struggled to contain public outcry against censorship and tight control of information. Dr. Li Wenliang, who sounded the alarm about the disease, succumbed to an infection and died this week. The Chinese government arrested him for blowing the whistle.

Then officials tried to suppress news of his death. Afterwards, millions of Chinese citizens saw the hashtag #IWantFreedomOfSpeech on Mandarin language social media. But the Chinese government censored that too.

Are Wengui’s Crematorium Claims Credible?

Watch VICE’s 2017 profile on Guo Wengui. At the time, he published bombshell documents alleging corruption in the Chinese government. He got the attention of the media and reportedly the U.S. State Department.

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