When instructing, it is best to stand at the beginner’s left side and be ready to clutch his pistol if he turns it dangerously.
The target should be a white bull’s-eye of about five inches diameter on a black ground, and at six to ten yards’ distance.
The target should be of cardboard, so that the bullets will go through and into the butt—a hard target may make the bullets rebound.
The duelling pistol has a silver bead front sight, and a big U back sight.
The black front sight on most pistols is quite wrong. It prevents quick shooting, and I am in this book teaching quick, practical shooting only. Practice at hitting minute stationary objects with a long aim died out the same as the revolver did.
Formerly, much of the revolver shooting was done at stationary black bull’s-eyes on white targets, just like rifle shooting was done. I always protested against this, claiming that the revolver was meant for quick shooting at moving or suddenly appearing objects, and that extreme accuracy at stationary targets was not its metier.
The war has proved I was right, and now these deliberate shooting exhibitions are used only to show what accuracy a pistol is capable of, like shooting rifles off a gunmaker’s rest. A pistol shot out of a vise can show its capabilities better than any man can hold it.
It was this shooting at black bull’s-eyes on a white target which caused the front sight to be made black so as to show on the white target, when sighted at “6 o’clock” under the black bull’s-eye. This is all wrong. When the black front sight is placed on a dark object, as a man’s coat, it cannot be seen.
The white or silver bead sight on the duelling pistol is instantly seen and is the only practical sight for a pistol.
All this goes to show how worse than useless the old method of revolver shooting was, and I do not intend to revert to it in these instructions on shooting its successor, the automatic pistol.