World's Fastest 100 Shots? ft. Jerry and Lena Miculek

Jerry Miculek and his daughter, Lena, are two of the most renowned professional shooters alive. Both Jerry and Lena compete in 3-gun, where shooting fast and loading fast are the name of the game. There's no doubt that Steve can shoot fast. However, he can't reload at the same speed as the Miculeks. Jerry and Lena have mastered the art of quick reloads, so today, we're putting our strengths together to complete a 100-round challenge. How fast can one shooter shoot 100 rounds? Three professionals, two guns, one shooter, one hundred rounds! Can Steve's shooting keep up with Jerry and Lena's reloads? Let's find out!

The Challenge

The goal of this challenge is to have one shooter shoot 100 rounds through a shotgun as fast as possible. The difficult element of this is getting into a rhythm that allows consistent shooting while maintaining constant speed.

The Setup 

For our first attempt, we set up a bunch of clays about 30 yards down range from our table. Steve stood at the center of the table with Jerry on his right and Lena on the left. Our consistent flow of ammo is due to the fact that Steve will be shooting two shotguns. Each gun started with eight rounds in it. As soon as the timer goes off, Steve grabs a gun and shoots all 8 rounds. Then he hands the gun off and grabs the second gun as the first one is loaded. Simple right? Not so much...

The First Attempt

This trial run started a little bit rough. The hardest part for Steve, besides managing recoil, was trying to balance how fast or slow to shoot all 8 rounds. If he shot too fast, there would be time lost as Jerry and Lena would have to catch up with their loads. The goal was to get into a consistent flow of things to not throw any particular element of the process off. The hardest part for Jerry and Lena (besides having to load wicked fast) was having to keep track of how many shells they loaded and count any loads that they may have fumbled while loading to keep on track for 100 total rounds.

The Art of Speed Loading

You don't become a record-holding shooter by taking your sweet time to reload your gun. The way these Miculeks load is absolutely amazing. For this challenge, Lena was using a method called quad loading. There are special ammo belts that stack 2 shotgun shells vertically on top of each other rather than just one line of shells that you may have seen before. Lena has the belt situated so she can grab shells with her right hand. This process begins with her grabbing 2 rows of shells - 4 shells total. She then flips her gun over and slides in 2 shells at a time with her thumb as the primary push point. For this challenge, she was doing this motion twice, hence why each shooting spurt was 8 shots.

Jerry was also using a form of quad loading but with a bit different hardware. Instead of shell stacks of 2, Jerry's belt has shells stacked 4 high in a polymer cylinder to keep them in line. His custom Mossberg has a special addition to the loading port to guide the stick into the magazine tube. To get 8 rounds in the gun, Jerry had to slide in 2 sticks back to back without fumbling any. But of course, physics still exists and nobody is perfect. If he were to load too quickly under the pressure of handing his gun off in time, there is a high possibility that the shell stick could come into contact with the loading port either off-centered or too quickly, thus resulting in a shell falling to the ground. The challenge is accounting for these fumbled loads over the duration of the shooting. 

The Second Attempt

After working through the first attempt, we knew changes would be made. The total time came out to about a minute and a half. However, we didn't get all 100 shots off, and Jerry accidentally stopped the timer as he quickly reached for it to see the results. After we discussed how it went, we decided to take another stab at it but with a different target presentation, making the challenge much harder for Steve as he now has to hit targets rather than just machine rounds into the ground. Our new targets included a dueling tree, a Texas Star, a spinner, a plate rack, and some static steel. This second attempt went almost perfectly. Steve hit every target, got into a fast rhythm, and handed off his empty guns smoothly. Lena pretty much rocked both attempts. Jerry got target-focused after our warm-up round and didn't fumble a single stick load the second time. Everybody was so consistent that by the time we grabbed the timer, we had gotten off a total of 106 shots!   

The Final Score

We clicked the shot timer back to when we hit our 100th shot, revealing our final time with one shooter to be 72.61 seconds. That's about 1.3 shots every second if spread out over the total time! We can't say that we've seen this particular challenge done before, and until somebody else tries it, I suppose it is a record! Not that it matters...lol

Conclusion

If this fun challenge was to prove anything, Steve got hot on that trigger, and Jerry and Lena have mastered the art of speed loading! If you want to see some of the other crazy things these two can do with guns, check them out on YouTube! (HERE)

 Whether our targets in the field or our targets in life, we will only hit what we are focused on, so live the #targetfocusedlife 

Stay Target Focused,

Steve