In all shotgun instruction, I've seen the advice on patterning the shotgun for maximum effectiveness. I teach this as well in hunter education. In some rare cases, there are definite pattern biases -- shooting left/right/high/low. Some of these may just be how the bead lines up with the shooter's eye but it's all the same when you can't adjust the sights -- hold somewhere off-target to offset the bias.
As a young man, I tried to pattern my wife's 20 ga. I shot at a large cardboard box and noticed a concentration in the lower right quadrant in the shape of a crescent moon. Aha! Or so I thought. Repeat testing showed this was just a random outcome. There have been other patterns with that gun but never the same crescent moon in the lower right. I've found oddball concentrations with both my .50 and .62 smoothies but never anything consistent enough to worry about (other than trying to just tighten the pattern).
But nearly every time I see somebody at the range patterning their gun, listen to another instructor talk about patterning or watch any videos about patterning, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 shots taken before a bias has been declared. This seems off to me. A shotgun's pattern is effectively random within a certain "cone" of concentration. One of the ways you can tell real randomness from manufactured randomness (a perfectly even dispersion) is that real randomness ALWAYS shows some kind of pattern. Stock charts, coin flips, dice rolls, roulette -- it's all the same. Patterns are inherent in randomness. But patterns from randomness begin and end without warning. In other words, they're unreliable for purposes of prediction (the next shot in this case). Only through repeated testing can you find the bias. But those need to be a lot of repetitions. 1 or 2 shots are simply not enough -- not even close.
So for those of you who have found definitive pattern biases in your smoothbores, how many shots do you feel are necessary to declare a bias? Is your bias simply a sight/bead alignment issue? A bent barrel? Or some special je ne sais quoi about your gun that makes it do something repeatedly different than normal?
As a young man, I tried to pattern my wife's 20 ga. I shot at a large cardboard box and noticed a concentration in the lower right quadrant in the shape of a crescent moon. Aha! Or so I thought. Repeat testing showed this was just a random outcome. There have been other patterns with that gun but never the same crescent moon in the lower right. I've found oddball concentrations with both my .50 and .62 smoothies but never anything consistent enough to worry about (other than trying to just tighten the pattern).
But nearly every time I see somebody at the range patterning their gun, listen to another instructor talk about patterning or watch any videos about patterning, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 shots taken before a bias has been declared. This seems off to me. A shotgun's pattern is effectively random within a certain "cone" of concentration. One of the ways you can tell real randomness from manufactured randomness (a perfectly even dispersion) is that real randomness ALWAYS shows some kind of pattern. Stock charts, coin flips, dice rolls, roulette -- it's all the same. Patterns are inherent in randomness. But patterns from randomness begin and end without warning. In other words, they're unreliable for purposes of prediction (the next shot in this case). Only through repeated testing can you find the bias. But those need to be a lot of repetitions. 1 or 2 shots are simply not enough -- not even close.
So for those of you who have found definitive pattern biases in your smoothbores, how many shots do you feel are necessary to declare a bias? Is your bias simply a sight/bead alignment issue? A bent barrel? Or some special je ne sais quoi about your gun that makes it do something repeatedly different than normal?
