A much bigger part of that has been addressing flinch/anticipation jerking, which is an ongoing effort with lots of dry fire drills, exercises with a few randomly placed rounds in a revolver, and lots of practice with lighter wadcutter rounds to focus on the fundamentals.
It is
great that you have identified that as the big issue in your handgun shooting. That is the big issue for about 95% of people when they shoot handguns. All the other stuff doesn't really matter until you can get that sorted out. A 1MOA sight misalignment doesn't really matter if you've got a 40 MOA pre-ignition push. Many, many people resist the notion that they have a flinch, and spend years addressing stuff that isn't the real problem.
For people with a tough-to-cure flinch/pre-ignition push (and I speak from experience on this), there is one key insight that you need to have: Almost all severe pre-ignition pushes are accompanied by - indeed, barely
preceded by - a blink. Shooting is, first and foremost, a
visual activity. When we blink, we turn off our conscious awareness of where the gun is aimed... and the subconscious reptile-brain impulse to push against the gun's impending recoil takes over. Worse, because our eyes are closed, we cannot monitor the sights and we cannot even see the flinch in action. We just see shots straying far from the last point-of-aim that we saw, and it's baffling/frustrating. Once shooters manage to keep their eyes open and visual perception running well enough to see the push happening, they're pretty quick to stop doing it. And by "pretty quick," I mean less than a magazine's worth of shots.
So job #1 is to cure the flinch. And step #1 of job #1 is to cure the blink. OK, how do we do that? Attention on
seeing. Spend some time shooting without any concern over group size. In fact, shoot without any target at all. Just aim at the backstop and
watch the gun go off.
See how much you can see. Try to see the brass eject. Try to see the slide move or the hammer fall. Try to see the muzzle flash (lots of people have never seen their own muzzle-flash!); with a revolver, try to see an B/C gap flash. Once you can reliably see the gun going off, you can focus your attention on the sights.
Once you can reliably see the sights through the shot, then it's worth adding a target. Until then, don't worry about targets or groups. Once you are getting visual input, you will begin to make rapid and easy improvements in marksmanship, because you will be able to literally see your mistakes as you make them, and you will be able to self-cure the vast majority of them. It's like driving a car... if you kept blacking out on the road, not only would you have lots of accidents, you wouldn't learn anything from them and wouldn't get better as a driver. But if you were able to start maintaining awareness, you'd learn to drive acceptably well in short order.
OK, what if you are trying the above and just cannot get there? Even without a target, you just keep blinking on half or more of the times the gun goes off? Here are some things to make it easier:
- Maximize insulation from blast/flash/noise. Double plug (earplugs under muffs).
- Find the lower threshold of what is blink-inducing, and shoot a lot of that. If a .22lr only induces a blink some of the time, shoot a lot of that until you blink 0% of the time with that power level. If an airsoft gun is enough to set off a blink, shoot that a lot. (I actually had a blink that was so sensitive that I did this... just the CO2 puff from an airsoft gun with a reciprocating slide would induce a blink from me. So I spent time in my house "firing" an airsoft gun that had gas, but no pellets, just to desensitize myself to it.)
- Conversely, sometimes it helps to shoot a few rounds of something that has a lot more blast and flash. Shoot a few rounds of full-power 10mm and even +P 9mm will seem soft by comparison. Sometimes it just helps to reset levels of what your subconscious considers "a lot" of blast and flash.
- If the exercise of seeing the gun go off is proving very difficult, if you can, have an experienced shooter go stand next to you. Hold the gun in a firing grip pointed towards the berm, but with your finger off the trigger indexed on the frame. Allow the other person, standing safely to the side, to put their finger in the trigger. When you think the sights are aligned on the target, tell the other shooter you are on target. They will wait a short, but random period of time. You may feel your eyes fluttering as your brain tries to guess when the gun will go off, but within a few tries, your brain will guess "wrong" and accidentally see some shots go off. This can sometimes kick-start a willingness in the brain to "see" more with greater trust that nothing bad will happen just because the eyes are open at the moment of ignition. Chances are good you might shoot a really good group this way, too!