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.