First time ever shooting a 1911

So, joined a new club as my previous club has been run out of the city hall basement range they've been in the past few years leaving a club with 56 years of history without a home...

At the new club had to take a rules/safety/introduction session and was required to rent a firearm from the rental cabinet and shoot a whole box of ammo under the supervision of a range officer to sow that I can handle a firearm safely and should be accepted to join the club.

So, having never fired a 1911 before I picked a stainless steel Kimber 1911 in 9 mm and bought a 50 rnd box of locally produced reload ammo 9mm 124gr fcp rn (think it's the store/club that produces them).

Don't think I did all that bad considering I've never shot that many of any calibre in that short a time and my experience in shooting anything other than 22lr is extremely limited. Seems the sights could do with being adjusted and most of the low shots were later on in the box as I was getting tired.

Now that I'm a member of this club and any pistol calibre firearm is allowed, I don't have the excuse that the club only allows 22lr to hold me back from growing the collection...

Nothing wrong with that

That is a very promising start.  

Slartybartfast wrote:At the new club had to take a rules/safety/introduction session and was required to rent a firearm from the rental cabinet and shoot a whole box of ammo under the supervision of a range officer to sow that I can handle a firearm safely and should be accepted to join the club.

A bunch of tools wanted to start that nonsense at our club. The problem is that we're at nearly 1300 members, with about 100 new members a year. I pointed out that it wouldn't be feasible, and as we feature rifle, trap, and archery, it would be both prohibitive to build the volunteer base necessary to do such a thing, and easily circumvented if we only applied it to pistol.

I've since had a fairly mutual separation from my volunteer position there. They wanted to do interviews for all those new members. I pointed out that we would need to develop a standard for non-admittance (lest somebody be rejected because they were the wrong color or whatnot, or at least broadcast that they felt that way to the world). I also pointed out that interviews would be impossible to evaluate in terms of successfully screening new members, consume a large amount of volunteer time, alienate new members by asking them invasive questions, and (most damning, I thought) create a system that punished honesty and rewarded deception. In the end, I felt that trying to judge others based on a conversation wasn't consistent with my 2A values--one guy insisted that he could judge a person's character based on a handshake, I laughed until I realized he was serious.

The Treasurer told me I had "better improve my attitude" and that I "worked for him". So--no need to put up with that!

It's cool, though, as I'm still an elected Director.

Point being, I bet a lot of you guys are the Something-Somethings at your local club. Interviews and questionnaires and such work on a small scale--I know a 60-member club locally that does it, because they're BE-only and the average shooter would probably damage their equipment with poor shooting--but there's costs and risks to it. If you wanna screen people successfully, a national background check only runs $40 per, and is infinitely easier to accomplish, more effective, and quantifiable than an interview.

Used to be, got run over by the new IDPA crowd.

One of my clubs requires you to have a TX license to carry, or if you do not you have to submit to the same background check as is required for a license to carry.

Keyholed wrote:Point being, I bet a lot of you guys are the Something-Somethings at your local club.

Well, way to bring the conversation down a dark path that is totally unnecessary. As I'm not in the USA, 2A opinions don't interest me one bit and that's bringing the conversation to a political side that isn't necessary or welcome on this forum.
So far, I haven't met anyone at the club who is a "Something-Something" and I don't expect to. There seemingly are over a 1000 members, so the club isn't small either. 
The safety introduction wasn't given by a volunteer, a paid range officer was paid by those of us taking the course at the time. And quite frankly, I'm happy to know that whenever I go to the club the people in the next stall at least can demonstrate safe behaviour and shooting skill to a range officer and aren't there for their first time and are less likely to be doing anything unsafe next to me. 
This wasn't an "interview", it was a reading of the club rules, a walk through of the ranges, a discussion of expected behaviour and responsibilities on the range, and taking a firearm and shooting a box of ammo downrange with no intervention of the range officer.

Lets keep the discussion on whether it was the sights or my trigger pull that put the center of POI to the left.

Slartybartfast wrote:

Keyholed wrote:Point being, I bet a lot of you guys are the Something-Somethings at your local club.

Well, way to bring the conversation down a dark path that is totally unnecessary. As I'm not in the USA, 2A opinions don't interest me one bit and that's bringing the conversation to a political side that isn't necessary or welcome on this forum.
So far, I haven't met anyone at the club who is a "Something-Something" and I don't expect to. There seemingly are over a 1000 members, so the club isn't small either. 
The safety introduction wasn't given by a volunteer, a paid range officer was paid by those of us taking the course at the time. And quite frankly, I'm happy to know that whenever I go to the club the people in the next stall at least can demonstrate safe behaviour and shooting skill to a range officer and aren't there for their first time and are less likely to be doing anything unsafe next to me. 
This wasn't an "interview", it was a reading of the club rules, a walk through of the ranges, a discussion of expected behaviour and responsibilities on the range, and taking a firearm and shooting a box of ammo downrange with no intervention of the range officer.

Lets keep the discussion on whether it was the sights or my trigger pull that put the center of POI to the left.

i'm going to mostly guess sights, as the group is there to the left,  now the far outsiders could be the trigger pull.

I hesitate to answer your question because it seems to be to be the wrong question.   I think the more important question is, "Did you feel a difference between how you executed each shot?"  Your group looks big enough that it might be an assumptions that the heaviest concentration of holes are what you did right and the lower ones were the mistakes.

To illustrate the point, I just adjusted my sights last night to bring the whole group down because my shots in the black were the mistakes in my shot process (trigger pull).

Aprilian wrote:I think the more important question is, "Did you feel a difference between how you executed each shot?"

I agree. The ones that were low were either ones where I though I did poorly and expected them to be low, or were the last few shots where I was starting to feel a bit of fatigue in my arm.

Being a range rental gun, don't think I'll be playing with the sights. But it's nice to know I can pick up a stock Kimber 1911 and do not too badly.

Slartybartfast wrote:........I've never shot that many of any calibre in that short a time and my experience in shooting anything other than 22lr is extremely limited. Seems the sights could do with being adjusted and most of the low shots were later on in the box as I was getting tired.

If you were used to a .22 and moved  up to shooting a 1911, maybe you were getting tired, or maybe you were flinching.  If you ever noticed your gun "dipping" when  you might have tried to fire after the gun was empty, then you might find the thread here about "anticipation" useful.

I say that because it happened to me when I went from a 22 to a 45.  Shots were better when I started to use the 45, and got worse the more I shot.  Then, a few times the gun didn't fire, and I saw the barrel move downwards.  (Put one "dummy round" into the magazine in a random location, and see what happens when you try to fire it.)