Shooting .22lr at steel

[P-11 shooter]

10 yards....because I stand beside shooters throwing .38 Super at steel at that range all day long with no ill effects if the target is clean and setup right.


Lycananglesmatterthrope

This. Properly designed steel targets direct the rounds/fragments down into the ground. If your target is straight up and down it can throw splatter back at the shooters.

[saleen322]

I have had this setup for some years. The backstops are all scrap steel that a local yard lets me pick for $.25 a pound. The 25 and 50 yard target traps are 3/8" (conventional pistol and 22) and the 100 yard is 5/8" plus an additional 1" center plate that I shoot anything at. The concrete bases hold sand in the bottom and they level the traps as the ground is not level. Targets are stapled to cardboard that is just binder clipped to 1/4" round steel frames. When the cardboard is done, just clip on another piece. It is an inexpensive setup but it works well.

[eXceLon]

Properly designed steel targets direct the rounds/fragments down into the ground. If your target is straight up and down it can throw splatter back at the shooters.

At the last group shoot something must have been wrong with the setup in the steel bay, when I was watching other people shoot I was getting hit with splatter almost on every other shot. It was annoying, but nothing more than minor scratches.

The big danger with splatter is to your eyes. What can be an annoying little scratch on your skin is enough to do serious damage to an eye. Always wear eye protection when shooting.

I imagine there might be more of a danger to splatter if you're shooting rifle steel at close ranges, but pistol splatter tends to be fairly harmless.

Frankly, target shooting closer than 10 yards doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I don't see why. Action shooting is a totally different beast than long-range precision shooting.

[imashooter2]

I don't see why. Action shooting is a totally different beast than long-range precision shooting.

Action shooting (USPSA, ICORE, etc.) is much different than target shooting in my mind.

[t1m0thy]

We just buy a cheap iron skillet and set it up out at about 100 yards and hang it from a wire between two posts.