SpudFiles

Well air rifles in the oympics fire from 10m.
But the target is the size of the plam of your hand and the bullseye is the size of your thumbnail.

Shooting bits of paper at 10 metres is hardly fun, those sort of rifles might be capable of one-hole groups but barely have enough power to give a mouse a headache.

I'd rather have a 30cm group at 10 metres if it meant enough power to go through several inches of wood

I was told once I should shoot competitively, as I had just managed to shoot a 2 MOA shot group at 10 yards (easily fitted under a 5p coin*), and I was still fairly new to shooting.
Had I taken it up properly, it wouldn't have been impossible for me to have a national level I'm told.

That wasn't the path I wanted to take with my life though. I shoot stuff for fun, not as any form of competition, and as JSR says, shooting paper isn't very fun.
It was still good to be able to show up the people next to me at the Cadet range (who kept missing and destroying the pegs holding their targets up), by punching 5 holes all in a tight group at 20 yards.
A lot of people weren't keeping all 5 rounds on an 8" target at that distance, although given the lax standards at the lower levels at Cadets, some of them passed.

*A 5p is 18mm across. This was considered the ultimate challenge at the Cadet detachment, and when I left, only 2 people other than myself had ever managed it. The joke that went with this was if anyone shot a bad group, you said "Ah well, it'll still fit under a £5 note" (7cm by 13.5cm - which is about 41 MOA at 10 yards). We had one person who's groups looked like he had taken a sawn-off shotgun to the target.