Once upon a time, before shooting was banned, I used to know the best fullbore pistolsmith in the world. He has since gone into the shadows, so no names and no packdrill, but there are those who will remember a certain establishment in Hertfordshire. We (still no names) used to foregather in his shop on Friday nights. He would lock up the shop and we would take up residence in the workshop, smoking rather heavily, drinking Madeira (which the master-gunsmith insisted on calling ‘Malmsey’), occasionally testing things on the indoor range, and generally putting the world to rights.
One night we had an Argument. It was about which shooting discipline was the most difficult. Before we could get stuck into this we had to have a sub-argument about what exactly we meant by ‘most difficult’, eventually settling on ‘that which requires of the shooter/weapon combination the smallest angular error’.
Having deconvened the Trigonometry Subcommittee we drew calculators. At the time I was a technical author and so really should have documented the whole thing, since it was quite a few man-hours of effort, but I’d only have had to eat it and shoot my typist so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t.
By the time that our nearest and dearest were all convinced that we had by this late hour probably formed a small mercenary unit and had ourselves shipped out to Foreign, we had established to our satisfaction that the most difficult shooting sport is Olympic 10m Air Rifle.
Leaving out the equations, each of which is said to lose one a reader, and rustily repeating the calculations, it seems that to place a 4.5mm projectile inside a 5.5mm diameter ‘bull’ ring, without touching the ring itself (a scoring convention called ‘outward gauging’), at a distance of 10m, requires of the shooter that they maintain a theoretical angular error of less than ±10 seconds of arc, and of the rifle that it should maintain none at all.
In fact it is somewhat more difficult than this because the projectile, despite being called a ‘wad-cutter’, does not produce a perfectly-punched hole of exactly its own diameter, but a slightly larger one, the true size being thought to depend on a great many things such as the nature and humidity of the target paper, atmospheric conditions, terminal velocity, rifling twist rate, projectile design and so forth.
Therefore it is probably fair to say that Katerina Emmons is, for the time being at least, the best shot in the world.
