The Modern Pistol and How to Shoot It

CHAPTER IV

We, in those days, used revolvers and black powder, which made such shooting very difficult owing to the smoke obscuring the target.

I give at the end of this book the best targets, full size, made in these competitions which will now remain permanently the best on record, as the revolver and ammunition are no longer made. They will rank with the “High Wheel” trotting records as “Hors Concours.”

Any one who wishes to compete in revolver-shooting competitions in England must modify my teaching in the preceding chapters, and refer to my Art of Revolver Shooting for details of competition.

The duelling pistol is not used in England, but there are many revolvers still in use there; England is the last country to use the revolver in the army, and is the last refuge of the revolver, just as Yellowstone Park is the last refuge of the buffalo.

For competition in England, practising will have to be done with a revolver, not an automatic pistol, and a deliberate aim taken at a black bull’s-eye on a white target.

In the United States, the automatic pistol is the sole weapon now. Several Challenge Trophies, which I modelled and presented to various associations, have had to have their conditions altered to “automatic pistols” from “revolvers,” and as the automatic inevitably tends to rapid shooting, the days of stationary target shooting are numbered.

Many people defend shooting at a stationary target, on the plea that one must learn one’s alphabet before learning to read.

This is correct as far as it goes, but they carefully omit to add that after a boy has learned his alphabet, he goes on to reading, and writing. He does not merely repeat his alphabet all his life.

Just the same argument is used by those who say that blundering through Greek and Latin, with the help of a dictionary, teaches modern languages; that these latter are “so easy after a grounding in Latin and Greek.”

If it is so easy why do they not learn modern languages. They cannot speak a word of any language but their own, and even the few sentences of Latin and Greek they can parrot-like repeat, no foreigner can understand, as they pronounce them with the English vowel sounds. For the same reason they mispronounce all foreign names.

A Russian who cannot speak French and German as well as his own language is considered entirely uneducated.

A man may be a crack shot at a stationary target and yet be absolutely useless with his pistol in case of having to use it in a hurry at anything in motion.

If you want to learn something, learn it, do not learn another thing, so as to be prepared to learn something else later on, if you care to.

If you want to eat a peach do not first drink ten plates of soup, and eat a leg of mutton, or you may not have the time or desire to eat the peach.

If you want to learn practical pistol shooting, learn it, do not waste time learning unpractical shooting.

You not only waste your time, but you spoil your “timing,” which is the great thing in pistol shooting, and also your sense of direction. You get into the habit of putting up your pistol and then searching for the bull’s-eye, instead of having it all come by instinct, like putting your spoon into your mouth.

I can tell a man who is not a practical shot, by the way he first finds his sights, and then hunts round for the target with them. If it were a live target, it would have made itself scarce while he was searching for his sights.

CHAPTER V

A near-sighted man finds the hind sight too far for him to see it clearly, and then makes the fatal mistake of shooting with a bent arm.

This not only prevents accurate shooting, but he is very apt to get the hind sight into his eye from the recoil of a kicking automatic.

The arm should be held straight and extended to full stretch, so as to point the pistol by sense of direction, just as a well-fitting shotgun stock enables the shooter to aim without consciously paying any attention to the sights.

Use the pistol exactly as you would use a shotgun. It is this want of knowledge of shotgun shooting which makes men shoot a pistol as if it were a rifle being used at a stationary target.

These men only understand lying down with a rifle, and poking about with the sights to find the target after they have put the rifle to their shoulder. Some have a lot of incantations first; they aim at the sky, bring the rifle down slowly, and then make a bull’s-eye on the wrong target as they naturally cannot know which is theirs of a string of targets, if they only fish about looking through a pin hole for it; they know nothing of the possibilities of a rifle or pistol, unless they are shotgun shooters as well.

The public consider “I did not know it was loaded” as ample and full excuse when one man shoots another in a so-called “accident.”

Not to know if the firearm you are handling is loaded is an unpardonable crime. It is so simple to open the firearm and see for yourself. I never take the owner’s word for it if he tells me a firearm is not loaded. Before I handle it, I examine it for myself.

The public think that no one but an expert can possibly know if a firearm is loaded; that the only way to know is to pull the trigger, and if any one happens to be shot, well, that is unavoidable and nobody is to blame.

It is to try to partly remedy this danger (it is impossible to make any firearm or instruction in its use “fool-proof”) that I ask any one who takes up this book to read the two following chapters, even if they take no interest in shooting. It may save a life.

Everything we do is a compromise, and nothing human can be made perfect in all particulars.

I give my ideas of what is wanting in automatics, not from a mechanic’s point of view, but from that of the one who has to shoot them.

Few mechanics are shooting experts. They make beautiful pistols from a mechanical point of view, but which are clumsy and unpractical from the shooter’s point of view.

Early inventors of automatics were not practical shots.

The inventor of one of the earliest automatics came to me with his invention. It was utterly impossible to handle or make any good shooting with it. It was like trying to eat soup with a fork. He kept telling me that if I “held it like this” and “did this,” I should be able to shoot with it, but it was as if he had told me if I sat with my face to the tail of the horse and held on by his hocks, I should be able to ride better than the usual way. Besides being of a most unwieldy shape, to grasp which you had to spread your fingers in all directions, this pioneer of the automatic pistol had all sorts of levers which must be moved by your different fingers in order to shoot it, as if you were playing the cornet.

Inventors, instead of evolving a pistol from their imagination, should consult an expert pistol shot, as to what improvements on existing pistols are required.

We are told by writers who use the fashionable word “imagination,” that to do anything, from governing a Nation to destroying submarines, “All that is needed is a man with ‘Imagination.’”

“Imagination” may do many things in legend or story but it will not teach a man pistol shooting, or enable him to invent an automatic pistol. I put experience and technical knowledge before “imagination” and theories.

In rifles there is the same sort of difficulty. It took me years before I found a gunmaker who would try to make a rifle on the lines I consider desirable for big-game shooting.

Big game is shot at short range, so flat trajectory is of no importance. What is important is to have a rifle which is light and well balanced and yet will knock down an animal with a terrific blow at close range. One does not want the sort of rifle so largely advertised as an ideal rifle for big-game shooting—a rifle which weighs as much as an arm-chair, balances like a poker, kicks like a horse, and is warranted to shoot into a two-inch bull’s-eye at four hundred yards, but is impossible to align on a rapidly moving animal at a few yards off, owing to its clumsiness and weight.

Inventors of firearms expect their customers to adapt themselves to their weapons instead of making the weapon to fit their customers, and answer to their requirements.

I stopped a man just in time, taking a Lea-Metford to shoot rooks with!

I was lecturing on the cruelty and uselessness of docking horses, amputating the bones and nerves of the horse’s tail and searing it with a hot iron, and what for? A man in the audience stood up and said: “If I did not dock my horse he would be too long to fit between the shafts of my cart.”

This is just the inventor’s attitude:

You must shorten your trigger finger by cutting off the first joint. I cannot alter all the blue prints of my invention just because you find the trigger too far back for your finger. Your finger is too long; my invention is perfect.

As a shooting man, not a gunmaker, I may suggest improvements impracticable to make with present means, but it was not by saying machines heavier than the air cannot be made to rise that the aeroplane was evolved.

It will be found that I have modified and even entirely changed some of my ideas since I published the Art of Revolver Shooting in 1890.

This is of course inevitable: one lives and learns, and I have learned much on the subject since then. Mechanical improvements have altered and eliminated difficulties which I had to teach how to avoid twenty-eight years ago.

On the other hand, new difficulties have arisen which have to be combated.

Those who cribbed from my former writings made a great mistake, and instruction which was quite right for revolvers is wrong for automatics. The position of the thumb, for instance, or the filing of the sights (which, almost without exception, these compilers of books have taken without acknowledgment from my Art of Revolver Shooting), are not applicable to modern pistols.

The best way to learn pistol shooting is to have an expert stand beside you, but, lacking this, the only way is to read a book by an expert.

It is very easy to write and to pose as an expert by the use of scissors, but it is rather hard on those who wish to learn, and also on those whose ideas are taken and used without acknowledgment.

I do not think any expert could write a book on pistol shooting using quotations, as each man has his own system.

CHAPTER VI

I cannot myself understand how a man can clean a loaded pistol, as by cleaning I understand getting the fouling, nickel, etc., out of the bore of the pistol, and the cartridge must first be extracted to do this. But I suppose a man not used to a pistol would mean by cleaning, polishing the outside, raising the hammer, and then putting a rag through the trigger guard and pulling it backwards and forwards against the trigger with the butt of the pistol resting on his knee and the barrel against his chest.

He of course does not first open the pistol to see if it is loaded; he leaves it for the inquest to decide “that he did not know it was loaded.”

I am not writing for such people; they are better shot and out of the way, else they might hurt others.

The second thing is never to load the pistol except when necessary.

Most people buy an automatic, get the gunmaker to load it for them, and put it in a drawer or their pocket, and keep it like that for years, or worse, leave it lying about loaded.

A pistol must be periodically cleaned. If it is kept loaded for years, it will probably jamb if any one attempts to fire it.

A pistol kept loaded is a constant source of danger to everyone, including the owner.

I knew of a case where a revolver was kept loaded by a bedside for twenty years and thrown into a trunk each time the owner went on a journey.

After the owner’s death, I was asked to see if the pistol was safe.

It was lying in its case beside the bed, and when I opened the case I found the barrel was lying so that it pointed at the head of any one sleeping in the bed.

I found it loaded in all the chambers, the hammer let down on one of the caps so that its sharp point, by constant friction, had polished and nearly worn through the cap.

I took it into the garden and fired that cartridge.

The hammer had during all those years rested on this cap and the least tap on the hammer would have fired it. Each time it was thrown into the trunk it was a mercy it had not gone off.

If it had remained on the cap much longer, the sharp nose of the hammer would have reached the fulminate and fired the revolver.

Here was a case of a loaded revolver, like the sword of Damocles, threatening the life of its owner all night long, every night, though it was put by the bed as a safeguard.

The hammer should have been put down on an empty chamber.

However, to repeat, never point a pistol under any circumstances at anything you do not want to shoot.

Never have it loaded except when absolutely necessary.

Now as to when it is necessary to have it loaded. Most people are much safer if they never load it. If you want a pistol to frighten burglars with or to carry in dark lanes at night, get a brightly plated nickel one. The larger you can carry the better. Do not buy any cartridges for it.

If you get the gunmaker to render it impossible to fire it, even if loaded, so much the better.

You can stop any but the most desperate man by “brandishing” this at him in approved theatrical style.

I know of a jeweller who stopped a highwayman by pointing the nickel plated pump of his bicycle at him.

During the war a man took a number of the enemy prisoners by threatening them with his empty revolver.

For people who know nothing of firearms it is much the safest plan not to have any cartridges.

Never allow “ornaments” shaped like pistols to lie about.

People get so used to playing with these that they at once point a real pistol when they can get hold of it.

Even when a pistol has to be fired it only needs to be loaded just before being used, as a rule.

When target shooting, it need only be loaded the moment before getting into position for shooting. If all the shots are not immediately fired from this position it should be at once unloaded.

I saw a most disgraceful neglect of this precaution at a shooting meeting, which if the Range Officer had also seen, the man would have been expelled from all meetings. He was an expert revolver shot too!

Several of us had made very good scores with the revolver at a stationary target.

This man came up carrying a hand bag in which his revolver and cartridges were kept.

“I have a few minutes to spare before my train goes, and I will have another try to beat you”; so saying he took out his revolver and cartridges, handed in his ticket, loaded, and began a score. He made three bad shots, swore, then without taking out his cartridges, he just opened his bag, put the revolver in, shut the bag and went off.

Never touch an automatic pistol until you are expert with a single-shot pistol. I do not mean expert to make good scores, but absolutely safe not to point it at any one, and able to take out the cartridge with safety or to put the pistol at safe or half-cock.

We will suppose you have the single-shot pistol and cartridges, and the target in front of you with a sufficiently large background that it does not matter where your bullet goes if you keep your muzzle always pointed in that direction.

It is almost impossible to have a range absolutely safe against an accidental discharge putting the bullet over the butts.

A man who swings his pistol over his head is almost sure some day to let off a bullet high over the butts if he does not blow his own brains out first.

If the shooter pays attention all the time to keeping the muzzle of his pistol pointed towards the butt he will be safe even if his pistol goes off accidently.

The barrel must be aligned towards the butt. Most beginners think that, if they see the muzzle of the pistol against the butt, it is aimed at the butt. That is not so. You can hold a pistol almost vertical like a candle in its socket, and think the muzzle covers the centre of the target, but if it is fired in this position the bullet will go straight in the air.

To aim a pistol, the breech (the part nearest the butt of the pistol) must be aligned with the muzzle on the target.

Keep the pistol lying on a table before you and pointing at the butt, and when you lift it always keep it thus horizontal or slightly inclining towards the ground but always pointed at the butt.

All single-shot breech-loading pistols open by pressing a lever, whether on top, at the side, or underneath the barrel.

Press this and open the pistol, look through the barrel to see that there is no cartridge in it and that the barrel is clear, and then close it.

Do this constantly for many days, so that you get into the habit the moment you take the pistol in your hand to look through it to see if it is unloaded, and no obstruction in it. To fire a pistol which has an obstruction in the barrel may burst the pistol.

If any one asks to see the pistol, first open it in his presence, of course pointing away from him or any one else, and look through the barrel before handing it to him. If an automatic, first take out the magazine and open the barrel as well.

Unless he is a shooting man do not hand him any cartridges. If he wants to see what your cartridges are like take the pistol back, open it again and see that it is still empty, put it away safely, and then hand him a cartridge to examine.

All this may seem super-caution but it is necessary, especially with an automatic, and unless you do this by instinct with the safer single-shot pistol, you may at any moment have a dreadful accident with an automatic for which you will be sorry all your life.

Now, standing facing the butt, open the pistol, put a cartridge in it (an empty cartridge case, not a loaded one). Put the pistol, if it has an outside hammer, to full-cock, being very careful to keep it pointed at the butt, lower the hammer to half-cock, open the pistol and extract the cartridge, and close the pistol again; repeat this many times till you can cock and half-cock without the hammer slipping or falling by accident.

If it had a loaded cartridge in it the pistol would go off should you let the hammer slip down, which is one of the most frequent causes of accidents with pistols having external hammers.

Some hammer pistols have a rebound, that is, when the hammer falls it rebounds to half-cock.

CHAPTER VII

Do not put your first finger on the trigger when cocking. Keep all your fingers outside the trigger guard to avoid any chance of your touching the trigger when cocking.

There are two causes of accidental falling of the hammer in cocking and so causing an accidental discharge of the pistol.

One is the hammer slipping from the thumb, or being released by the thumb before it is fully at full-cock.

The other is pulling at the trigger at the same time that the pistol is being cocked (which learners invariably do).

The result of pulling the trigger at the same time is that the hammer does not catch into the bent which holds it, and falls as soon as the thumb is removed.

There is a click when the pistol is well at full-cock, which tells you the pistol is properly cocked, the hammer or cock goes slightly beyond full-cock and then comes into place by a click. (See quotation from Byron’s Don Juan on a later page.)

To put to half-cock is the most ticklish of all and is the cause of most pistol accidents.

The thing to do is to let the hammer fall to just below half-cock and then bring it back to half-cock. If it falls too low it fires the pistol, if it does not click it has not properly got to half-cock.

Still holding the barrel of the pistol in the left hand and the grip in your right (keep the pistol carefully pointed at the butt where an accidental discharge would do no harm), put your right thumb on the hammer. When you have a firm touch of it so that it cannot escape you as it falls, put your first finger on the trigger and press, but only for an instant.

The hammer will fall but you must keep it from falling fast, by holding back with your thumb. Lower the hammer down to just below half-cock back to half-cock and then release your thumb hold.

If the hammer went its full fall it would explode the cartridge. With a rebounding hammer, the hammer falls and instantly springs back to half-cock. Therefore in letting a rebounding lock down from full to half-cock, if you are able to restrain it well during the first part of its descent, even if it slips from your thumb before it is quite at half-cock, the rebound overcomes the downward fall and it rebounds to half-cock without actually exploding the cartridge because it does not quite reach it.

Half-cock is the safest position for a loaded single-shot pistol but not safe enough to carry in a pocket or holster loaded. For that, it needs a safety lock to hold it at half-cock.

As you gain confidence you will find that, with a rebounding lock (such as all duelling pistols of full-size calibre by the best makers have), it requires very little holding back at the hammer in letting it down to half-cock and the hammer remains at half-cock by itself, without any click.

With an ordinary hammer which remains down when it is fired (like many single-shot pistols of American make or the .2 bulleted caps of the “Flobert Pistol”), the hammer must be kept firmly held until it is below half-cock, and then brought to half-cock where it will click, as it also does at full-cock.

The great advantage of an automatic pistol is that it does not have this click and so does not give warning to an adversary and is not apt to go off by accident when being put at safe.

If the trigger is held back whilst cocking it is as if you were to ask a man to sit down and pull the chair from under him. He falls just like the hammer.

Almost all modern pistols with visible hammers have rebounding locks so that after the hammer falls, on the trigger being pressed, and explodes the cartridge, then it jumps back to half-cock of itself. This saves time as otherwise the hammer resting on the exploded cartridge would have to be raised by the thumb to half-cock before the exploded cartridge could be extracted and a fresh one put in.

Now, practise till you are perfect, using an empty cartridge.

Open, insert cartridge, close, put to full-cock, lower to half-cock, extract cartridge, close pistol.

Do not be satisfied till you can do all this without a hitch or hesitation and without letting the hammer slip.

When you do this perfectly you can go on to the next lesson, but not before.

When you have the pistol at full-cock, it can be fired by pressing the trigger, but we have not come to that yet. We are only learning how to safely handle a pistol.

CHAPTER VIII

An old gentleman, belonging to one of the learned professions, who had been an enthusiastic but very bad shot all his life, asked me to try his shotgun at some clay pigeons.

He was one of those men who always pride themselves on getting things cheaper than any one else.

He did not understand that a good gun is expensive; and that a second-hand gun by a first-class maker is much better value (and safer to use) than a cheap new gun.

Acting on his usual principle, he had bought a gun very cheap, “a splendid bargain which I have used the last ten years. I am not as strong as I once was so I bought a featherweight one.”

To buy a light, cheap gun is extremely dangerous. Only a very first-class maker can reduce the weight of a gun to its limit without risk of a burst, and the materials must be flawless.

When I saw the gun I was sorry I had offered to shoot it. The barrels looked fearfully thin at the breech, of inferior metal, and rattled from bad fitting, when one succeeded in closing the gun.

The weakness of the gun, however, was made up by the strength of the cartridges, which were for pigeon shooting, and loaded with a full 1¼ ounces of shot and an enormous charge of nitro powder.

The gun had the proof mark for black powder only!

He was delighted with his cartridges and told me he had bought them at a great bargain from the executors of a celebrated pigeon shot recently deceased.

I ventured to suggest that it might be dangerous to shoot such a heavy charge of nitro powder out of a very light gun proofed only for black powder.

He said: “That’s nothing, I am not as active as I was and I was told these cartridges would kill much farther than lighter loaded ones, and how cheap they are!”

I, with many misgivings, had a clay pigeon thrown, but the gun refused to go off.

I took out the cartridges and tested the trigger-pulls by feel.

They were like lifting a coal scuttle.

I said to him: “Do you know what your trigger-pull is?” He did not understand what I meant. I used a trigger-tester. They were well over nine pounds each. A shotgun generally has 2¼ for front trigger and 2½ for back trigger.

I had another pigeon thrown.

I took a hard tug at the trigger and the gun went off with such a recoil that the stock nearly jumped off my shoulder. I do not know where the charge went; the pigeon was almost out of range before I could get the trigger to act. (I learned the cartridges had been stored near the kitchen fire!!!)

This was enough for me and fully explained why the old man, whilst shooting all his life, had never become expert.

First-class gunmakers see to the trigger-pull so as to make a compromise between a nice, light trigger-pull and one safe to use.

Military rifles are made with a very heavy trigger-pull in order to make them safe to be handled by men who have rough, hard hands from manual labour.

This, in my opinion, is a mistake. A very heavy trigger-pull prevents accurate shooting, because the rifle is always going off later than you want it to and encourages hanging on to the trigger.

The man gets into the habit of pressing on the trigger when he is not shooting. He knows the rifle will not go off unless he gives a tug at the trigger.

With a light trigger, a man knows that he must keep his finger clear of it, or he will fire his rifle accidentally.

When learning the handling of the single-shot pistol (the automatic must not be touched till the learner is familiar with the single-shot), blank ammunition may be used.

The learner is very apt to discharge his pistol unintentionally, and the fright caused by firing a blank cartridge by accident will impress on him to be more careful in the future, before he had a loaded cartridge in the pistol, which might cause a fatal accident if discharged unintentionally.

As the automatic cannot be made with as light a trigger-pull as a single-shot pistol, it becomes a question as to how light the trigger-pull of your single-shot pistol should be.

If you want to make the best possible shooting with it and to make your lessons as pleasant and as easy as possible, have as light a trigger-pull as your gunmaker (not an ironmonger who sells firearms) recommends.

If, however, it is important that you should learn an automatic pistol well, and the single-shot pistol is only used for getting familiar with firearms, then have the trigger-pull adjusted to be as near as possible, not only of the strength, but of the character of the automatic pistol you intend to use later.

Two triggers of the same weight may vary greatly in the feel and sweetness of the pull.

One may drag or grate. The other seems to go off at your mere wish.

No automatic can have the delicate touch of a single-shot pistol. It has to withstand such rough handling by the mechanical loading of the explosion.

A thing to be especially remembered is that one who is not expert, trying to put the pistol to half-cock, ruins the trigger-pull and renders it unsafe.

The point of the seer can be broken off or distorted by someone fumbling with the trigger and hammer.

Do not let people touch the hammer or trigger of your pistol, any more than you would let them jerk your horse’s mouth.

In the course of your first trials in cocking, putting to half-cock, etc., you will probably injure your trigger-pull more or less, and should you feel the least alteration or grate in it, have it examined by a gunmaker before worse mischief occurs.

With a hammerless (i. e., pistol with invisible hammer inside the lock) there is not this danger. Cocking is accomplished by the act of closing or opening the pistol which at the same time causes the hammer to be locked at safety.

What corresponds to cocking and putting to half-cock is accomplished by sliding the safety bolt to the firing position, or to “safe.”

It is advisable to have the same weight of trigger-pull on all your pistols. If they vary it makes it difficult to shoot equally well with all. The heavier trigger-pull of some will hamper you, and the lighter trigger-pull on others may make you discharge them before you mean to.

As individual fancy in trigger-pull varies, some makers sell their pistols with intentionally a very heavy trigger-pull, so that their clients can have it regulated to their requirements. This probably was the reason my old man had such a heavy trigger-pull on his “greatest bargain I ever saw” gun.

Before practising for or entering a competition, see that your trigger-pull complies with the regulations, as nothing is more annoying than, after making a winning score, to find your trigger-pull is too light and your score in consequence is disqualified.

It is best to have the trigger-pull well over the minimum so as to allow for its getting lighter during shooting.

CHAPTER IX

As my book is not a gunmaker’s catalogue there is no use in giving illustrations of ammunition.

Such illustrations are neither artistic nor of any interest. Many makes of cartridges are long since obsolete and only linger in catalogues because the old blocks happen to still exist and can be used to fill up a catalogue and make it “fully illustrated.”

Any one conversant with pistols does not even glance at them. When he buys the pistol, he also buys the cartridge made for it. He does not buy a pistol and then try which make of cartridge will fit into the chamber.

A cartridge should fulfil the following conditions:

First of all, it should be safe against accidental explosion, such as dropping or when feeding through the magazine of an automatic pistol. Next, the case should not split or swell when fired, so as to make it difficult to extract.

Next (this is a matter also of the construction of the pistol), it should not blow back fire into the eyes of the shooter. This has several times happened to me with cheap makes of rifles and pistols and one is very apt to have such an accident when shooting at bottles at a fair with cheap worn rifles.

I asked a woman attending at one of the shooting booths at a fair, if it was not very dangerous when drunken men came to shoot.

She answered: “Oh no, when a man looks dangerous I load only blank ammunition for him.”

The chief requisite is accuracy; and without accuracy a cartridge is useless.

CHAPTER X

There are several styles of single-shot pistols (see Plates 2, 9, 10, and 17). I will not give a list and description of all makes, like a gunmaker’s catalogue. I will merely describe a few of the typical ones. Very many are not only obsolete but of no use, and I do not intend to describe any pistol or ammunition merely to condemn it.

All that I describe have some merit, and most of them have great merit. Still if there is any ammunition or pistol left out, you must not at once jump to the conclusion that I consider it bad or dangerous; it may be that it was omitted through an oversight.

It is best to have a pistol light in weight and shooting as small a charge as possible, so that there may be no great weight to hold up and no flinching from the noise or recoil.

PLATE 2. BREECH-LOADING PISTOLS
(By Gastinne-Renette)

With a very small charge it is possible to use a very light pistol, and though this is advisable for a beginner still, weight in a pistol, even if it shoots only a very small charge, is an advantage for accurate holding.

The trigger-pull must not be lighter than 2½ pounds for safety (especially for a beginner) and if the pistol weighs less than 2½ pounds, it is very difficult to press the trigger without disturbing the aim.

Lightness in weight of the pistol is also often obtained by shortness of barrel, and to shoot a pistol with only a two or three inch barrel is the supreme test of skill in pistol shooting and a useless handicap to a learner.

At one time I thought it impossible for good shooting to be had out of a two inch barrel, but a friend and I tested this at twenty-five metres, and we both, after a few trials, got strings of shots on the chest of a life-sized figure of a man target.

But it requires a man who has shot for many years to be able to do this; even an average shot goes very wide and wild in his shooting with such a short barrel.

These very short barrels are therefore useless for the general public for self-protection, except when the pistol actually touches the opponent.

Even the short police pistol requires a lot of learning. Most people imagine it is merely necessary to buy a little pistol “which I can put in my waistcoat pocket,” to become burglar proof.