Gathering meaningful data is not easy. Shooting groups is not easy. Put those things together and you are bound to run into issues. Having some experience doing this in a professional setting, I tend to stay away from it here. My previous groups with the CC9 were one time affairs, with no attempt to gather meaningful amounts of data. They were a snapshot into what the gun, ammo and I might be doing at a given moment. This is really no different, though I had some real surprises.
I shot a group of each ammo both supported and unsupported. My first group was shot standing off the tripod and my second group was shot freestyle. A couple of notes about group shooting may be in order. I always try to shoot supported groups first, so that I can remove as much of the human element as possible and get a baseline for what the gun and ammo may be capable of. In this case, I shot standing off of a tripod. That works fine, but I think I shoot better groups prone as a general rule, so I may go back to that. I also think prone is a legit field position (though tough to pull off in many circumstances) so I prefer to shoot that way.
Once I know what the gun and ammo can do in my hands when supported, I want to see what I can do unsupported, or freestyle. One of the big advantages to the duty type guns that I prefer to carry is that you can more easily exploit their inherent capabilities compared to smaller guns like the CC9. What a gun can do intrinsically is important, but it is more important to me to see what I can do with the gun, flaws and all.
The CC9 does offer a nice advantage in this area compared to other small guns though, in that it has a full size trigger reach, or length of pull. This makes it easier to break a clean shot compared to guns that have a shorter than normal reach to the trigger. The smaller grip does work against you and as I mentioned before, I may build it up a bit and see how that affects things.
The pic below shows my tripod setup for 25 yard group shooting. The groups all hit to the right, as you can see from the pic at the top. This is because I keep forgetting to bring the right size wrench out to the range. The little Sig optic uses screws that do not accept 9mm rims, lol. Since I don’t carry this gun, none of this matters, but I may try to center things up next time. An interesting observation (literally) is that with my astigmatism, I never see a dot, regardless of which RDS I’m using, with or without optical correction. With this little Sig optic, the dot is perfectly round. I’ll have to inquire about how they do that.
So, here are the loads and groups I shot, in order.
147 grain Federal Gold Medal Match (FGMM) produced a 2.5″ group supported and a 2 and 7/8″ group freestyle.
135 grain Hornady Critical Duty produced a group so large I could not measure it properly when shot supported. Somewhere in the 7-8″ range is what it seemed since the ruler I had with me was only good for 6″. Shot freestyle, it produced a 5.25″ group. I really don’t know what to make of that, since that load is usually very accurate for me in a variety of guns. Some guns just don’t like some ammo, but I will try it one more time in the future to see if I can repeat the results. To elaborate, this is the ammo I finished the last 5 years or so of my career with. In my Glocks, it would hold 2″ groups for me, give or take. In testing at work, it would hold much less than that. In my P30’s, it will do the same. Given how bad it was in the CC9, I don’t suspect it will just improve next time, but I will have to see anyway. This is the worst I have ever seen it shoot.
115 grain American Eagle shot 3.25″ supported, and I seem to have lost my unsupported group. I don’t recall what it was but it was not too far off of the supported group.
Finally, I shot the custom loaded Method Munitions again. Supported was a 1.75″ group and unsupported was 2.5″. That was the last group I shot and the best group of the day for me. After the Critical Duty mess, it was a welcome relief as I was wondering if I just couldn’t shoot that day or what.
Group shooting is tedious and difficult, which is a good reason to do it. It also makes you a better shooter, not only in slow fire but at speed as well. The point of shooting is hitting and without regular and meaningful practice in slow fire marksmanship, you will not progress as much as you could, even if the results are sometimes ugly.
