Hello,

Diving into this class this week talking about accuracy and what it is not, but more importantly what accuracy is and how it's used, and I find that some Folks get Accuracy and Precision confused for one another.

The Two are similar values but measured differently. An Example simply put would be Shooting a target at any distance and hitting it multiple times would be considered accurate. Shooting that targets bullseye would be considered precise. For Firearms, accuracy is measured in a couple different ways. When they are being tested in manufacturing facilities it's easier to measure their accuracy because its being done mechanically and they can rule out the variables of a shooter and it tests for things like accurate follow-on shots with rising temps, the fitting of crucial parts and the limits of the weapons and every step of ballistics which are all correlated with a weapons ability to be accurate.

The Next way we measure shooting would be considered Intrinsic Accuracy which measures the mechanical accuracy of a firearm, but it is determined by the skills and limits of the shooter. A lot of Handgun designs today that are purpose built for specific scenarios like concealed carry and close engagements, in the right hands of a trained individual have a lot of potential intrinsic accuracy.

Lastly, Practical Accuracy, which determines how well the design of the weapon works with your needs. Something with a lot of practicality exhibits more than one feature that will benefit your objective. One Extreme Example of this would be, being on a 500-yard Long-Range Shooting Competition with a handgun. The handgun probably wasn't designed for this type of shooting, and this makes it un-practical for this course of fire but showing up to the range with something similar to an AR-10 or a bolt gun that's chambered in a centerfire rifle round like .308 or 6mm would boast much more practical accuracy in this scenario.

A good experience I can share would be with my vehicles in the service that utilized an UGWS (up gunned weapon station) which consisted of the M2 which is heavy machine gun that we all know and love and right next to it is the MK19 automatic grenade launcher that you either love or hate. When engaging targets in the turret with these weapon systems it was common practice for the crew chief to "mark" targets with the .50 Cal before engaging with the MK19. Although both weapons can accurately engage targets out to extreme distances, we would do this because the Mk19 is considered an "area" weapon and isn't considered precise, but the grenades have a blast radius effective up to a certain distance for soft targets. By predetermining a targets distance by engaging them with the heavy machine gun, you are suppressing them but also determining distance by walking rounds on a target so you can use that to adjust your sight and engage with the area weapon more accurately and have more effective shots. When done well this technique can be done instantaneously and is very cool to see. I think this is a great example of the different types of Mechanical, Practical and Intrinsic accuracy working together. Thanks for reading! Stay Frosty.

Bibliography

David Tong. Intrinsic Vs. the Practical Accuracy of Handguns. 2016. Intrinsic vs. the Practical Accuracy of HandgunsLinks to an external site.

Matt Robertson. How to Measure Precision: Or why three shot groups are Terrible. 2020. How to Measure Precision: Or, Why Three-Shot Groups are TerribleLinks to an external site.

Precision Rifle Blog. Precision and Group Size. 2020. Precision & Group Size - Statistics for Shooters Part 3 - PrecisionRifleBlog.comLinks to an external site.