The DOPE Drill – General Concepts
DOPE, in shooting parlance, is an acronym meaning ‘Data Observed from Previous Engagements’. The ‘data’ part of this can cover a lot of ground, depending on what kind of shooting you’re doing. If you’re a long-distance shooter, DOPE is a record of your bullet drop and wind drift at various distances and environmental conditions. If you’re a practical shooter like me, DOPE is usually the amount of sight confirmation needed to hit a target of a particular difficulty, as quickly as possible. Basically, a history of your previous shooting that you can use to inform your future shooting.
The DOPE Drill is something my local training group came up with to help generate this kind of performance data. It’s a simple drill that can be run with a pistol or a semi-auto carbine. The setup requires a single USPSA target, a shot timer, and 25 yards of range space, which makes it very well suited for an indoor range.
The DOPE Drill – Procedure
Start position for all strings is weapon at low ready (meaning that your gun is pointed no higher than the ground just in front of your target.) Set your shot timer for a random delay, no par time.
String 1 – Target at 5 yards. On signal, fire 5 rounds into the target. Record your time and hits.
Strings 2-5 – Repeat the same procedure at 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards. Record your time and hits for every string.
Scoring – Add up your total time. You should have 25 hits on the target. Hits are scored A=5pts., C=3pts., D=1pt., Misses=-10pts. Maximum possible score is 125. Divide your total points by your total time, to get your Hit Factor (HF), e.g. 115 points / 8.9 seconds = 12.92 HF. A higher hit factor is better.
Goals – with the pistol, a HF of 10 is excellent. With a rifle, you’re looking for a HF of 20. Don’t expect to approach these scores in the first couple of attempts.
My First Attempt, and Some Thoughts
I ran the DOPE Drill with both my pistol and my carbine last Sunday and took a couple pics of the targets:
This is not an easy drill. But, that said, I would caution people against thinking of it as ‘easy’ or ‘hard.’ The purpose of this drill isn’t so much to get the highest possible score – it’s to generate data that tells you what you need to practice, and how.
To that end, let’s look at my own performance.
On the rifle side, all my times were a little bit slow, especially at 5 and 10 yards. Consistent slow times across the board can sometimes indicate a problem with recoil management – after breaking the shot, the rifle isn’t returning to the same place, so I need to take time and energy to move the gun back on target before the next shot. I can improve my recoil management by experimenting with how I grip the rifle and mount it into my shoulder, while shooting fast strings of fire.
With the pistol, the times in general look very solid, but my hits are falling off out past 15 yards. Also, if you look at the pistol target, all my hits trend towards the left side. There are a few things that could be causing this – for one thing, my sights might need to be adjusted (I shot this drill with a new batch of ammunition, without re-zeroing.) It’s also possible that I’m not looking at the exact center of the target where I want to hit. Either way, I should spend some time shooting timed groups out at 20-25 yards, focusing on getting all A hits as fast as I can. Also, notice how there’s very little difference in time between my 15-yard string and my 20-yard string? That may mean that I can go a little bit faster at 15 yards, by shooting with a little bit less sight confirmation. That is something else to experiment with.
Conclusions
I like this drill for three reasons:
First, it tells you clearly and precisely what you need to be working on. By calculating the hit factor for each string, you can identify the areas that need correction. Combine this data with your hits on the target, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what you need to work on.
Second, it forces the shooter to use different aiming schemes. To get a good score on the DOPE Drill, you’ll need to understand the difference between predictive and reactive shooting, and when it’s appropriate to use which method of sight confirmation. At 5 yards, you’ll want to focus hard on the center of the target, see the flash of your sights in the A-zone, and smash the trigger as fast as you can. At 25 yards, on the other hand, you’ll want to see the dot (or sights) lift off the A-zone for every shot.
Third, it’s an easy drill to set up and run. That’s important, because most of the benefit from this drill will be found when you shoot it many times over a long period and watch how your scores trend.
I would be very interested in any gun-loving Glibs to give the DOPE Drill a try and post their results. Tell me what you all think!
I really need to take my Xmas pistol for a spin. How is it the end of March already?
Will try! If there’s nobody else at the shack I could set all the targets at once and go all five-stand.
Is the PCL A zone smaller than an IPSC A zone? Those look like more like IPSC than USPSA (with a head grafted on)
Looking forward to seeing your results.
I don’t have the exact dimensions for the PCSL A-zone, but it’s a vertically elongated octagon, about 6″ wide by 9″ high. The USPSA classic A-zone is a 6″x11″ rectangle. So I was kinda shooting this one on hard mode.
Here’s official IPSC dims: https://www.glibertarians.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IPSC.png
The Winter Steel targets are 6″ x 11″ rectangles and 8″ circles (IDPA -0)
PCSL A is smaller than IPSC — I did not realize this until looking at the dimensions, but the IPSC A zone is actually taller than a USPSA one. I did notice that I tend to have better scores on IPSC than USPSA targets but I had been assuming that the smaller D zone made me aim harder.
Small Ds are a universal problem that can be accounted for by rate of fire.
I haven’t shot any of my guns (.22lr, 9mm, .38 super, .45acp) in far too long. My neighbors are much too close.
Sounds like you need a silencer. My old Dead Air TiRant .45 will work with every cartridge you mention.
Mmmmm, .38 Super…
I don’t recall how much land is required to shoot on your property but I know I don’t have enough. On the upside I don’t have to post no hunting signs.
Those berms look kinda short.
I’m going to guess you don’t have neighbors behind them.
They do look short in the photo. Must be a trick of perspective, because in real life they’re over twenty feet high. Also, no neighbors. Rural West Virginia has its perks.
The thing is, it reminded me so much of one of the pits at the club NA and I are members of, but the proportions were all wrong and I didn’t account for “hey, maybe the berm is just further away” until after I commented.
Where are all of the old appliances and the one abandoned car?
To all my Glibs:
I want to make this a recurring series. So feel free to hit me up with shooting-related ideas or questions you have. I probably won’t do reviews of particular guns, because it kinda bores me, and there are al
Ugh.
…already a zillion YouTube and IG accounts that do reviews, most of which have more glazing than an all-glass donut shop.
So, what do y’all like? More training articles? Class reviews? Match reviews? Noob’s guide to practical shooting (not to step on NA’s paws)? Let me know!
From past experience, I think the answer is “yes” or “if you write it, we will read”
I would find match reviews interesting. Would you go over the setup as well as the shooting?
UCS speaks wisdom.
Yup. Also, you’re a much better shooter than I am so your intro would not be crowding out mine at all. Plus nobody remembers articles more than a few weeks old.
Noob’s guide.
I know I need to get some training in that’s not just plinking. What I learned in the army was counterproductive and so many years later has still screwed me up.
A new shooters guide to performance training? That seems like it would be up my alley, and also like something a lot of people could use. I’ll start pecking at it.
Flying with guns.
I’m skirt.
Well, the traditional way has been to strap a lot of them to your plane and wire them up so you can fire them from the cockpit. Careful that you don’t hit your own plane, especially if you have a propeller, get an interrupter setup to avoid shooting yourself down.
In the case of the A-10 Warthog, you find a big gun, strap wings and a pilot seat on it, and BRRRRRRRRRRRT.
I thought the pilots got a titanium bathtub instead of a seat.
In the Marines on the range we would use a data book for every day and the instructors would always tell us to check our dope at each yard line. I knew what it meant, but never knew it was an acronym.
Since I retired, I have never tried to shoot for time, I just pick a range and shoot a couple mags then move it to a different distance.
It does get a little boring and while I am an excellent shooter doing it this way, going for time would definitely make it more interesting.
The thing I love about practical shooting is it’s the opposite of concentrating on a single thing, you have to be aware of pretty much everything going on all around you at all times. Muzzle direction, finger discipline, your body positioning, your stage plan, your movement through it, how many rounds you’ve fired, where/when you need to reload, whether or not you can make the designated reload since you took a makeup shot you hadn’t plan because you weren’t stable enough on your last position and…
And of course, there’s that clock running in the background. It would be fascinating to see exactly how high the brain activity goes up during a stage. I know the general stress levels spike, it’s annoyingly common in cold weather to hear “make ready” and have my eyepro fog up as my heart rate jumps.
What’s a good shot timer for someone that doesn’t shot competitively?
I assume you can set it for a certain number of shots and it will tell you how long you took, but I’ve never used one.
The way shot timers work, you get a beep to signal the start of the string, and then a record of the time for each shot in the string. So you get something that looks like this:
1 1.24
2 1.46
3 1.91
4 2.19
…
So the beep was zero, first shot at 1.24s, second shot at 1.46s, etc.
Generally a shot timer will keep running and recording until you start a new string, or until it runs out of memory. 99 shots max seems to be common.
A good inexpensive shot timer is the PACT Club Timer III.
If any of this is confusing, I’m gonna be down at my parent’s place in mid-April – we should get together at the range.
For those of you that don’t mind math, take a look at that top row of ES’s scores. Hit Fator scoring is excellent at magnifying tiny differences at the high end of shooting. 0.17s turned into 4.2 hit factors, which is a fuckton.
To expand on this a bit – USPSA and PCSL use hit factor scoring, highest hit factor wins the stage. On a typical local match stage, a hit factor difference of 4.2 is the difference between crushing the stage and finishing in the lower third of the pack. ‘Fuckton’ is not too strong a word.
The difference in those two runs? I shot the 21HF with my carbine and the 17HF with my pistol.
Conclusion – Carbines are a lot more capable than pistols, and should be your first choice for, er…serious shooting problems, if at all possible.
It’s funny. I’m 3D printing a gun part right now. The Evil legislators hate 3D printing gun parts, but this one is specifically designed to render the Lego Rifle safely legal.
🤔
Does this violate my “Made in the USA” goal? I mean, I designed the part and it’s printing here, but both the printer and the filament came from the Czech Republic.
Did the bauxite and iron ore get mined out of the US?
🤷♂️
Besides, Czechia is probably the closes thing to America that exists in Europe.
What kind of plastic?
This is just PLA. It’s a shim, if if cracks I’ll remake it out of ABS.
High infill makes it unlikely.
However, warping and resistance to solvents are a question mark…
Well, it’s not made out of PLA – it’s made out of AIR.
The spool ran out of filament completely and the printer didn’t notice, just going through the motions without a care in the world.
Now you can pick your plastic guilt free!
It’s still Czech PLA, only the new spool is “Lipstick Red” instead of “Galaxy Black”. The red spool came for free with the printer when I bought it. Of course, I bought more spools knowing I’d use them…
The shim will be encased entirely inside the stock of the rifle, and should not see anything in the way of solvents. There will be a screw down the middle, and ABS* on two sides, so it won’t have much wiggle room for warping.
*injection molded body of the stock
The Czechia government, at the federal level, ran a shuck on the EU so that their citizens could continue to purchase correctly sized magazines.
Plus, they run some awesome IPSC matches.
Give them some love.
Dude, that’s dope.
This isn’t going to cause any problems…
US bans new foreign-made consumer internet routers
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74787w149zo
Because they are plenty of US made alternatives to choose from, right?
Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market router models approved previously through the FCC’s equipment authorization process. By operation of the FCC’s Covered List rules, the restrictions imposed today apply to new device models.
So no new models? Typical Trump administration…
I like deer size targets 10-30 yards, be vewy, vewy quiet until the trigger is pulled.