As it is so difficult to shoot at long range with a pistol there is all the more necessity to be able to judge distance so as to avoid another cause of error.
A long range revolver match took place in 1911 in Colorado, but many important details are lacking.
It was gotten up by the Magazine Outdoor Life of Colorado.
The conditions were five sighting shots, and then twenty shots to count.
The target was a brown paper profile of a turkey at three hundred yards’ range.
This description is very vague, as all reports of shooting by non-experts are; they always leave out vital details and put in a lot of useless matter; it may mean a target of fifteen inches in diameter (if it only included the body of the turkey) or over thirty inches (if it included the whole of the turkey, head, legs, feathers, and tail).
Probably it was the latter size as, if it was only fifteen inches in diameter, that would correspond to an inch bull’s-eye at twenty yards, or a 2½-inch one at fifty yards, much too small for revolver shooting.
It is extremely difficult to hit a four-inch bull’s-eye for a succession of twenty shots at fifty yards. I have hit it ten times in twelve shots (see page [349]), and the much greater difficulty of hitting a corresponding sized target at three hundred yards would make a full score impossible with a revolver.
The winner, name not given, made three hits for his twenty shots, six men hit it twice in their twenty shots, six hit it once, and six missed every shot.
This is not a very encouraging result of a long range revolver shoot.