Report on Guerrilla Sniper II Class

Warrior Talk News reports on the "Guerrilla Sniper II" class. It's long, but worth the read and has some great pictures of different weapon set ups and shooting positions. Some different ideas:

Just because you can't shoot prone doesn't mean your limited to the standard competitive rifle positions where you support the rifle entirely with your body and the sling. Use anything you can for support: trees, vehicles, structures, rucksacks, tripods, your spotter's rifle, your spotter, whatever you can use to get more stable. Scott Vandiver showed us a neat trick for this: most people only think about supporting the front of their rifle, which is a good first step. If you can, support the rear of the rifle as well. A good way of doing this when sitting is to put your rucksack on your lap and use it as a really big rear bag. When kneeling with a higher support, use the ruck between your knee and elbow. Support that rifle as much as possible.

And this:

After lunch, Scott Vandiver gave a lecture on high angle shooting. When you're shooting uphill or downhill, gravity doesn't have quite as much effect on the flight path of the bullet. If you take a long shot at an extreme angle, you'll end up hitting high. The way to compensate for this is by multiplying the range by the cosine of the angle from the horizontal (if they'd used examples like this in trigonometry class I would have been a lot more interested in the subject).

You can find the angle in several ways: On the simple end, string, a small weigh, and a protractor (such as the one printed on the side of a mildot master). There are angle indicators that attach to the side of your scope and read off the angle that you're holding the rifle at. Some ballistics apps you can download for your smartphone use the gyroscope and accelerometer built into the phone to calculate the angle. Finally, many laser rangefinders will also give you the angle along with the distance. Some of these methods give you the cosine directly, while others give you the angle in degrees and require you to consult the table or a calculator to get the cosine.

Trigonometry was never my forte, so I'll have to use something that gives me the cosine directly. Finally:

At 100 you don't really have to lead a walking target much, but you do have to successfully track them as they move. Scott Vandiver demonstrated how to do this effectively. He recommended that instead of shooting off your bipod, you shoot off your rucksack, with the bag as far back along the forend as you can get it. This allows you to get the maximum amount of angular movement without shifting your body much.