ArizonaSlinger
Junior Member
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I love Slinging.org!
Posts: 68
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This accuracy standard of which I am proposing shows that I favor the sling as a defensive weapon to be engaged at assailants (human or animal) 100 meters away. When your enemy is 100 meters away, you have lots of options. One of your options is that you can reload and shoot again if your first shot missed (or run). I don’t think anyone here can shoot more than twice at an assailant that is closing in fast from 50 meters. 100 meters is a better distance in my opinion. If an assailant is 50 meters away, and closing fast, I will start looking for a stout stick.
Here’s a nightmare scenario that turns out okay:
You are hiking alone in remote area and you come across marijuana “garden” that is nearly ready for harvest (don’t ask me how you can tell when it is ready for harvest, because I don’t know). Well you get a bad feeling so you start to turn around to leave. Before you do however you see two guys on the other end of the “garden” about 100 meters away. They gesture as if they would like you to come closer so they can “talk” to you. You hesitate for a moment so you can read their body language and assess the situation. During this brief moment of hesitation the men drop what they are doing and they start to stride purposefully towards you. You’re feeling of foreboding increases and you know the men mean to do you harm. You know how it will go down. First the men will “ask you for directions", as an excuse for them to get close enough to find out you are alone and to find out if you are weak. Then they will try to work you into a confrontation in order to give themselves the emotional energy it takes to kill a person. Then they will kill you.
Your friend is distance. Right now you have 100 meters of it. So you gesture dismissively at the men, in a manner that says, “I don’t want to talk to you,” Stay away”. So you finish turning around and start to retrace your path back to your car, friends, or wherever you feel safe. As you do, you check over your shoulder and you see the men start to hurry towards you and they yell at you to wait. You yell back, “Back off! Then the men start running at you at full speed. Up until now you merely had a bad feeling. Now their intentions are clear. They are coming at you in a manner that cannot be interpreted as anything other than an attack. You still have approximately 100 meters between you and them. So you sling a stone at them. The stone was already loaded in the sling. You shoot low and hard. Your hurried shot has a flat trajectory and it covers the 100 meters quickly, but it skips into the ground and ricochets alarmingly close to the men and their shins. In fact the men had to sidestep for all they were worth in order to dodge the missile, nearly stumbling in their efforts to avoid the threat. But you don’t wait to see what happens. You change your direction by 30 degrees, hoping that the men don’t notice your new course. You begin moving fast and low, hoping the foliage will conceal your position. This works for a few seconds, and then you hear a shout and you know that you’ve been seen again. You then bend your course so that it takes you to where the foliage will not interfere with you next shot. As you do, you let one rip. It only takes a moment and you didn’t even have to stop, because you had reloaded during your previous flight. This one is a complete miss. By now the men have separated some distance apart (with the intent to flank you) and their new position relative to each other caused you to misjudge their location. So the stone harmlessly flies between them. But you still have 100 meters of distance. You then decide to run towards the setting sun. You change course by degrees a little at a time until you are running west. You know that this will make it impossible to see your incoming stones. Each time you get a chance you let a rock fly at your assailants. Because of your speed, the men were not able to flank you and thus they have resumed running abreast of each other. You see a place ahead that looks good for slinging (no foliage to tangle your line and the ground is level). You put a 100 gram rock into your sling and you send a killing shot into the head of one of the trailing men. The other assailant stops abruptly. You raise your sling in posture that shows you’re ready to let another one fly, but there is no need, the man turns and runs off.
You find out later that the man you killed had a handgun. Because handgun accuracy at a 100 meters is a chancy thing (especially at a running target), you conclude that his intention was to wait until he was close enough to get a killing shot at you. He knew that firing the gun would draw unwanted attention. He couldn’t afford to fire the gun and miss, because if you got a way, the police would come down on him hard.
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