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Back in my day, it used to take discipline and skill to shoot well. Totally not bragging, but I could shoot the lips off a cockroach at 300 meters.
And while it did take some natural talent — we had people get kicked out of basic training because they simply could not shoot well — a soldier’s natural talents are further refined by skills gained from constant shooting practice.
We shot so much that I still have hearing loss in my right ear — it turns out, putting cigarette butts in your ears for protection because you forgot your “foamies”, doesn’t quite grant the same level of protection.
On the M4 range, the furthest targets were positioned at 300 meters. At that distance, the life-sized green plastic man-shaped targets were roughly the size of a pencil eraser held at arm’s length.
Put that 300-meter target in motion, and things get even more difficult.
We weren’t aware of it, but our brains would perform complex calculations: the percent of bullet drop due to gravity, wind direction, the relative speed of the target, direction of the target in two-dimensional space, the ambient temperature and humidity, our own breathing, and the barrel length of our rifles among other factors.