Little Known Way To Practice Long-Range Shooting Inside Your House (Reduced Size Targets 101)

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Here’s how you can practice with both your handgun AND your rifle inside your home, even if you only have a small space.

Obviously, we don’t want to shoot any holes in walls, so we’re going to talk about a unique twist on dry fire training (practicing shooting with an unloaded gun).

We have a pretty good data set that says most defensive pistol shootings in America (for civilians) happen at around 3-5 yards.

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That means you need 9-21ft worth of room for dryfire practice which may not be possible. And what if you want to work on accuracy at longer ranges? What if you want to practice longer-range rifle shooting too?

Introducing Reduced Size Targets For Practicing Long-Range Shooting When You Don’t Have The Space

This is something that I’ve been doing for a while now because I don’t have much space in my house.

You can practice both pistol shooting and rifle shooting.

First, you want a reduced size target.

What are reduced size targets?

Simply put, they’re exact replicas of whatever target you want to shoot, but simply “scaled down” in size so that you can use them at shorter distances.

For example, for your handgun training, you can click here to get a link to printout a One Third Size IDPA target, that prints on 8.5″ x 11″ paper.

Now, this is a 1/3rd size target. Conveniently enough there are 3ft in every yard. That means ONE FOOT with this 1/3rd size target = ONE YARD if it were full size.

That means you’d only need to be 20ft away to practice shooting an IDPA size silhouette at 20 yards away (instead of need a 60ft space which most of us don’t have indoors.)

If you want to get even more realistic, you can order pre-made cardboard cutouts of these reduced size targets like the ones from Ben Stoeger’s pro shop here. In the video below a guy reviews these reduced scale targets and shows how he practice his pistol, shotgun and rifle shooting with them.

Ben Stoeger also has other printable, smaller scaled targets on this page here.

If you’re into practicing your rifle shooting, then you can do it with dry fire training too. In fact, the military has used reduced size targets for a long time to train soldiers at 25m to simulate shooting 300m targets. You can easily find these targets online as well, such as on this page.

You can also improvise and use smaller targets such as thumb tacks with your rifle training to simulate really long distances. This article written to help Highpower competitors explains (emphasis mine):

“Dry firing can be done indoors or outside. To get the most benefit, use all your usual equipment. This will teach you to set up your gear quickly and efficiently, and get you accustomed to the feel of the coat, glove, sling, etc. Shooters with M14- and M16- type rifles will want to insert a coin under the lips of the magazine to hold the follower down and simplify operation. For targets, a 3/8″ diameter black thumbtack centered in a 2¼” square of manila file folder gives the right perspective at 18 feet. At 36 feet, a black ¾” round target paster on a 4½” square is excellent.

Do You Dry Fire? Do You Use Reduced Size Targets?

Do you practice at all? If not, you should!

Dry fire can be a little boring if you do the same thing over and over again, so finding ways like reduced size targets to make your training more fun is worth it.

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1 COMMENT

  1. As I recall, the “black” on the 200 hundred yard target was 12″ in diameter, it’s been a long time. A 7/32″ dot on a piece of white paper was equal to the 12″ black at 200 yards, simple ratio/proportion. Made a good aiming point with the Redfield Olympic sights on my bolt rifles for dry firing practice, which I never did enough of.

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