Plinking

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Plinking refers to informal target shooting done at non-traditional targets such as tin cans, glass bottles, and balloons filled with water.

Plinking is often done with .22 Long Rifle calibre cartridges since these are inexpensive and relatively quiet to shoot. Some shooters are disdainful of plinking, arguing that it can result in sloppy shooting habits, or they feel that the garbage that is sometimes created during plinking can give shooting sports a bad reputation. Nevertheless, many shooters find plinking an enjoyable pastime.

Responsible shooters clean up after plinking and follow general safety guidelines when shooting at any target; when plinking, a major concern is to ensure an adequate backstop exists so bullets will not strike or ricochet towards unintended targets or populated areas.

In nations such as the U.K., with more stringent gun laws than in the U.S., casual shooting is more often done with an air rifle (air gun).

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Tank Plinking during the Gulf War

During the Gulf War, the destruction and high attrition rate of Iraq's armoured divisions, due to coalition air attack prior to the land campaign, gained the term tank plinking among coalition air forces. This was as a result of the abundance of armoured targets and the extremely effective use of strike aircraft, such as the F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16 and the A-10 Thunderbolt, via very high sortie rates and utilizing highly accurate precision-guided munitions such as the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile. Though the F-15, F-16, and F-14 all sortied in the Gulf War, the A-10 Thunderbolt II received the vast majority of tank kills, firing more than 90% of the Mavericks expended in the campaign, besides its very effective GAU-8/A Avenger.

The air campaign was so effective that at the height of the air assault, Iraq's armoured forces were being reduced by over 200 tanks and AFV's per day. Apart from the materiel destruction, it also destroyed the morale of Iraqi tank crews, and this was borne out during the first armoured encounters by coalition ground forces, where it was found that Iraqi tanks rarely got off the first shot. As it turned out, the crews were terrified of staying in their tanks, which had been transformed into death traps by the air assault, and as a result, the crews were camping some distance from their tanks.

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