Feature

Tales From An Oklahoma Shooting Range

Craig F. Bohren

Recently, a friend of mine in Oklahoma, Bruce Palmer, participated in a shooting match on a foggy day. The conventional wisdom among target shooters is that, to sight your rifle, you must use a fluorescent orange disk against a white background. This opinion is so strongly held that Bruce was severely ridiculed when, in defiance of accepted practice, he used a black disk. Yet he was the only shooter that day who could see his sighting target. To make this triumph of science over folklore even sweeter, Bruce used a black disk much smaller than the bright orange disks of his fellow shooters, who had to resort to the ridiculous measure of sighting their rifles by shooting blindly into the fog and listening for the sound of their bullets hitting targets.