It seems as though it has become popular these days to look at the target presentations at tournaments and criticize them as being good or bad.
It is a perfectly logical progression to look at the presentations and criticize them based on what you like or dislike about them. The first comments typically come from the better shooters who like harder targets because some lower class shooter cannot have a day where he or she is out of their mind and shoot a score better than theirs on easy targets.
Again, a perfectly logical deduction from the top shooters. No one wants to lose to a person who is not as good as they are because they missed fewer easy targets than they did.
If it is a two or three-day shoot and the targets are hard, the top shooters feel like they have a chance to make up some ground they lost on the day before by missing some targets they wished they had not missed. Again, a perfectly logical deduction from the top shooters. Because if the targets are easy they feel that they would not have that chance to make up and would therefore lose the tournament because they missed more targets than the person who won.
You can typically find the target critics hanging around the scoreboard reliving the misses that occurred while they were shooting that day. There are always people who will chime in and agree with the target critics about the difficulty of the targets.
If the targets are perceived to be too easy, Lord help the target setter. If they are perceived to be too hard, Lord help the target setter. This begs the question: how do you get it right? Even the trap and skeet shooters who shoot targets that must fly prescribed trajectories and distances complain about the wind and backgrounds.
We would agree that there are certain things that make sporting targets good or bad, difficult or easy. But the fact that everyone has to shoot the same targets is what makes it a competition. In a competition, there is only one winner. The one common thread in all good targets is visibility. Regardless of distance, direction, or speed, if a target is easily visible to all shooters, it is a good target. Any judgment after that becomes the opinion of the individual. And that is usually based on whether or not the individual hit it or not.
We think most people would agree that a good target is one that you can hit consistently and others can’t. There are thousands of definitions of why a target is either good or bad, but that is not the reason for bringing this up.
It is becoming more and more obvious to us that people are setting a trap for themselves when they become a target critic. There are no hard or easy targets. They just are. Everyone must shoot them.
