Less than forty yards and generally at a few feet off is the range for pistols in actual combat.
The further the object shot at, the more accurate the aim must be to hit it.
It is difficult to do snap shooting with a pistol at one hundred yards, though one can do very accurate snap shooting with a rifle at that distance.
The reason is that the rifle has a longer barrel, so that a slight fault in the alignment does not so much matter, but with the short barrel of a pistol a hundredth of an inch wrong in the sighting, at one hundred yards, makes over twelve inches error where the bullet strikes.
In other words, an error of a hundredth of an inch in alignment in an automatic pistol at one hundred yards, would make the pistol miss a target twelve and a half inches in diameter, whereas a rifle at the same distance with the same error of alignment would graze the edge of a target two and a half inches in diameter.
The pistol is more than four times more difficult to shoot than the rifle at one hundred yards, owing to its short barrel magnifying the error nearly four to five times more than the long barrel of the rifle.
To compare a pistol with a rifle target at one hundred yards, the rifle target bull’s-eye would have to be reduced to a fifth of its diameter, leaving the bullet holes where they are, or vice versa, the pistol target bull’s-eye would have to be magnified five diameters, leaving the bullet holes where they are.
This means that in shooting a match at a hundred yards, the rifle would have to be given a bull’s-eye a fifth the diameter of the pistol target, the outside rings of the target in proportion, or the pistol must shoot at twenty yards, against the rifle at one hundred, both having bull’s-eyes the same size.
This confirms my experience that to hit a foot diameter bull’s-eye with a pistol at a hundred yards, is about as difficult as to hit a two and a half inch bull’s-eye at the same distance with a rifle. Of course standing position is meant. With the prone position for the rifle it is too great a handicap on the pistol.