How I Learned Marksmanship

Long ago, I was a young cub scout interested in guns. I wasn’t old enough to hunt yet, but I wanted to make sure that I had the skills to take down the ‘turdy point buck’ once I got became enough to hunt.

My Great Uncle gave me a 10 pump pellet gun somewhere along the line, and I was dying to shoot it. Unfortunately we lived inside the city limits, and shooting even the pellet gun outdoors wasn’t kosher.

My dad to came up with a solution: Indoor Range

We had an old school desk chair that we placed at the far end of the cellar at one end of the basement, and we built a pellet trap out of some scrap wood and tightly packed newspaper that we put up against the wall at the far end of his workshop.

I would pump the pellet gun twice, and shoot out the cellar door, across the downstairs family room, into the workshop, and finally impact the trap at the far end of the workshop. I don’t know that I ever paced off the actual yardage, but I probably had 50-60′ to work with. It wasn’t a lot of distance, but it was plenty for me to learn how squeeze a trigger, and I got to the point that I would shoot smiley faces into the target.

I must have shot several thousand rounds through that pellet gun in my parents basement. It worked out quite well, and taught me a lot about marksmanship. I’m not sure I’d recommend this strategy to anyone else, but it’s how I learned the basics.