Primers and powder need to be stored in their original containers, but locked well away from grasping and naive hands. If you have the space and a place to get them from, many reloaders use lockers harvested from a local school. These are about a foot wide and five feet tall, and can be had as singles, pairs and so forth up to just about any width you might want. Each “locker” can be padlocked – and MasterLocks, probably among others, sells them in pairs set to a common key. (Try WalMart, for example.)

I’m cheap.

The less I spend on other things, the more I have for bullets. And as any Bullseye shooter will tell you, to get good, you have to push a lot of lead downrange and, as most of you know, lead is not cheap anymore. Gone are the days of three or four cent heads. Today, you’re probably looking at eight to nine cents for a 200 grain LSWC, and if you buy in 5000 unit quantities, that’s not small change.

Steve Reiter, national champion Bullseye shooter many times over, is a stack of rocks.

Brian Zins has won the US national bullseye (Conventional Pistol) competition at Camp Perry Ohio more times than most of us have shot Xs in a single target. Understandably, when Brian speaks, bullseye shooters listen.

Don’t have an unloaded handgun to practice with? No problem. Here’s how to practice moving the trigger finger straight back. You can do this standing or sitting, any time day or night. All it needs is your attention and a credit card.

I travel for a living. My job often sends me out on a Monday and home again on Friday but sometimes there’s a Sunday “out” or a Saturday “back” day. As such, it’s difficult for me to shoot the Tuesday evening Nighthawks here in Phoenix. Worse, I often miss the once-a-month 2700s on Sundays when an outbound leg starts with a mid-afternoon flight.

For what it may be worth, I learned something unexpected in dry-fire. Whether or not I need to keep that lesson or if it was just a stepping stone along the way, I don’t know.

I tested my two 1911s, the ball gun and the wadder, on a Ransom Rest today. My primary goal was to confirm or deny my suspicions of one, and to have the other as a reference to give credibiliity to the overall results.

Heretofore, I’ve picked up 45 ACP empties at the indoor range I use in Scottsdale AZ. The ROs have even been so kind to sweep empties from others in my direction (after the other shooters have left) because they had observed me doing so. Over many weeks and months, then, I’ve accumulated quite a collection.

Here are some less-than-obvious values to good equipment.

• The bullet goes where the gun was aimed when the hammer was released.

That should be obvious but, as a beginner I knew my wobble was much worse than the inaccuracy of the gun. My “off the shelf” Springfield Armory “Mil-Spec” 1911 (the Parkerized version) would shoot a 6-8" group at 50 yards. That was good enough for scores of 8, 9, 10 and X. Pretty good.