by Kit Perez
Jack and his buddy Frank are off to the range. Jack has a new pistol, and even though he’s never actually seen Frank shoot, they talk about guns all the time at work, and Jack assumes that Frank can hold his own.
Once Frank starts shooting, Jack notices something immediately: Frank is anticipating recoil. His shots consistently break low and left. Frank, however, doesn’t see it that way.
He starts joking about the gun manufacturer, ribbing Jack about “messing with the sights,” and explaining that the pistol probably just needs to be broken in.
He just met the uncorrectable shooter, and if you’ve spent enough time around ranges, classes, or competitions, you’ve met one too.
Sometimes they’re highly experienced, with excellent gear and all sorts of facts they can spout at a moment’s notice. Sometimes they’re prior military or law enforcement, and sometimes not. No matter what their story is, if you watch them shoot, you’ll notice a pattern. Every mistake has an explanation, and it’s never operator error.
They blame the unfamiliar targets, the sun or lack of it, the ammo, or the weapon itself. It’s the wind, or the sights, or being tired, or distracted, or rusty. There is always a reason for why today is the exception to their normal shooting proficiency.
While plenty of firearms enthusiasts and sportsmen bemoan the price of their guns, their maintenance, and their ammo, the hidden ceiling to firearm proficiency is much simpler, and much more uncomfortable: the inability to absorb correction without defending against it.
Shooting is unforgiving; either you hit your target where you meant to, or you didn’t. That reality is what makes shooting a fundamentally feedback-driven skill. The target provides information, and so does the gun itself through recoil, cycling behavior, and other signals that shooters need to adapt to, sometimes immediately. Improvement depends on accurately processing those signals and adjusting accordingly. Once a shooter starts filtering feedback through ego or self-image, improvement slows or stops entirely. This is why some shooters plateau for years, even despite constant practice.
While many people assume that “repetition equals competence,’ the truth is more nuanced:
Repetition reinforces what’s already there. If your pattern is accurate, then practice will strengthen it and make it more instinctive. If your pattern is flawed, however, then practicing that flawed process will strengthen the flaw, hardening it into a habit. The critical factor is whether a shooter can recognize and correct errors during the practice.
One of the more interesting realities in a given skill is that beginners are often easier to teach than intermediate practitioners. Newbies usually expect to make mistakes and are still forming their understanding. In that environment, correction feels normal and necessary.
Unfortunately, intermediate shooters are different. They usually possess enough skill to be confident, but not enough to accurately diagnose their own mistakes. They can often shoot respectable groups on a static range, under familiar conditions. They know enough terminology to understand concepts and feel experienced.
All of this partial competence creates the dangerous condition of premature certainty. The more certain you are of your competence in a skill, the less observant you can become of your own mistakes or training gaps. You might stop examining patterns objectively, or stop collecting data, because you think you already understand what’s happening. Once that happens, feedback from outside of your own system is emotionally threatening instead of operationally useful.
If you watch a highly calibrated shooter who has a poor set of shots, you will see him pause and analyze. He might ask himself what changed, and in most cases, he can point to something he did or didn’t do that caused the shift. His attention moves toward diagnosis, and ego takes a back seat because fixing the problem is the mission.
A shooter who is insecure, defensive, or protecting his ego behaves quite differently. His attention moves outward immediately because the issue certainly cannot be him. Instead of investigating the error, he will instinctively move toward distancing himself from responsibility for it. This is an interesting phenomenon: the same culture that knows there is no such thing as an “accidental” discharge has members who cannot bring themselves to own mistakes on the range long enough to fix them.
These two examples depict the difference between calibration and drift. The first shows a shooter whose priority is accuracy and efficiency. The second shows a shooter whose priority is emotional comfort.
Human beings are extremely good at protecting their emotional comfort, and it’s not only found in shooting. Any performance-based environment is an opportunity to see it in action. The brain doesn’t like information that conflicts with established identity. If someone sees themselves as highly competent, any evidence to the contrary can create internal tension. It typically gets resolved by reinterpreting the evidence, rather than leaning into it and reevaluating themselves.
On the range, this can manifest in dozens of ways. Some shooters constantly chase gear changes because “bad gear” is psychologically easier to tolerate than skill deficiency. Others might become obsessed with external variables while ignoring obvious inconsistencies in their fundamentals. Some might even construct elaborate narratives to explain why their performance doesn’t reflect their actual ability.
The common thread running through all of these examples and many more like them is that they are all avoiding accurate calibration to a reality they find uncomfortable.
One of the surprising characteristics of highly (and truly) competent people is that they are often more willing to acknowledge their mistakes. Because their confidence is rooted in adaptation rather than appearance, correction does not threaten their identity. In fact, many of them look for errors because they understand that unnoticed mistakes become entrenched bad habits—and potentially serious liabilities.
This distinguishes genuine confidence from rigidity. Rigid shooters need to already be right; confident shooters need to get it right. The first protects ego, and the second protects performance. Over time, the gap becomes impossible to ignore, and a good instructor can pick up on the behavioral cues quickly, often before the students even start shooting. More often than not, those cues show themselves in practical (and even dangerous) ways once the class gets out on the range.
If you see yourself in this article, you’re not alone. You might be stuck in your skills, wondering why you can’t seem to break your training plateau. Even if you are absolutely positive that the problem isn’t you, give the following tips a try.
First, separate your performance from your identity. A poor run doesn’t mean you’re somehow unintelligent, or weak, or that your impostor syndrome has caught up with you—even if your failure was witnessed by your entire group of friends. Treating every mistake on the range as a referendum on your personal worth guarantees defensive behavior. Instead, treat them as impersonal data, so that you can create room for honest evaluation.
Second, delay your explanation. One of the most useful habits you can develop as a shooter is learning to observe before narrating. After a miss or a bad group, resist the urge you might feel to explain what happened, even to yourself. Instead, gather information. Replay the sequence mentally and look for anomalies in your own actions. Premature explanation often locks you into an incorrect conclusion. Take the time to do meaningful analysis; it won’t take long, and it’ll allow you to actually correct the problem.
Third, actively seek uncomfortable evidence. Humans often unconsciously search for proof that they are already correct. Normalcy and confirmation biases can get in the way, and effective shooters ditch both of those in an effort to find the real issues. Look for evidence that challenges your assumptions, because that’s where your blind spots are. This is especially important when you are moderately experienced, because the more competent you are, the easier it is to miss the small errors.
Fourth, maintain stability long enough to identify patterns. Shooters who constantly change gear, upgrade components, or even “try out” new stances or techniques they saw in a YouTube video can sabotage their own calibration process. Every external thing you change adds a new variable to consider. Make it easy on yourself and stick with one setup long enough to establish a baseline.
Finally, learn to view correction as a navigational aid instead of an accusation or attack. Feedback is simply neutral data; it’s information about your alignment between intended and actual performance.
This mindset shift is the core of adaptation and improvement. Change your mindset, and watch your shooting skills start to increase. The shooter who cannot be corrected is a shooter who cannot adapt.
Eventually, every shooter reaches the point where progress requires honest calibration. The target will simply report what happened; the shooters who improve long-term are the ones willing to face the reality being reported.
Especially if it’s uncomfortable.
