I'm trading excuses back and forth with a weakness in my mind. Truth is? I would like to be lazy and get away with being a less than ideal shot, even though shooting well is what's fun for me, not shooting just to kill something. I've never been the kind of guy who would love to just randomly kill stuff non-stop, much less at all. But I do want to kill pests, and I am finding two things frustrating: learning scopes (always an iron sight shooter before) and killing squirrels with my .22 when sometimes the pellets just bounce off them even at 25 yard range.
So I would like to have something more definitive to kill them. A .25 seemed the answer. Better in the wind, much more power, etc. And more forgiving if I am not dialed in right or not accounting for windage etc correctly. A dumb man's solution, and sometimes I can be that dumb man. Or ignorant one. We all start out that way.
It is going to take me time to be smart enough and patient enough to not want to lean on higher caliber to the do the job that better marksmanship, patience, and learning can do. In the meantime I look forward to taking it as necessary ... but hopefully only just long enough. Unless excessive cruelty is involved, there is nothing wrong with a crutch. But only for a while. Nobody needs a dependency! I am VERY new to this hobby, and don't want to let myself substitute ignorance for knowledge, or impatience or confusion for a steady learning approach, forever.
The learning curve is surprisingly long, though. That turns out to make the hobby more interesting to me. But in the meantime of my thinking about how interesting things are, I have tree rats to kill post-haste and I will use whatever is necessary as long as I stay on the right side of my personal line of whatever isn't unnecessarily cruel.
Eventually I hope I'm good enough to be like so many of those youtube Brits who do it painlessly with a low power .177, and that's my eventual goal. But it's not going to come quick, and I will likely have plenty of excuses along the way.
