Dress Up And Shoot
That’s me. My alias is Cholla. Two Saturdays a month I dress up like a cowboy and shoot in a four-gun competition with firearms designed before 1899. I love it. For brief seconds I’m Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Hopalong Cassidy, or whoever western hero I’m identifying with at the moment.
Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS) is fairly unknown in the shooting world, but once someone discovers it, they often become hooked for life. Why? Tex, one of the founders of the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) sums it up in a nutshell. “Yes, it’s a competition, we keep score, but it is first and foremost a fantasy sport for the whole family. It’s meant to be fun.”
So just what does a normal CAS event consist of? First, it isn’t a quick-draw competition. Second, we don’t ride horses, at least not real horses. Third, we don’t twirl our pistols like Doc Holliday or our rifles like Lucas McCain. Safety is of paramount importance at any CAS match.
There are two major organizations in the CAS world. The largest is SASS. Next is the National Congress of Old West Shootists (NCOWS). SASS and NCOWS are alike in many ways and different in a few. Many shooters, myself included, are members of both.
There isn’t enough space in this article to go into the ways SASS and NCOWS differ. The biggest difference is this: NCOWS strives for historical accuracy in dress and in firearms, to the point many NCOWS clubs also perform historical enactments. SASS is more liberal on what is acceptable in dress and firearms so members have fun with the costumes and firearms seen in B-grade western movies and TV shows, authentic or not.
In general, a CAS match is made up of six stages. Each stage includes a series of targets to be shot using pistols, rifles and shotguns. To make things interesting the location of the targets and the order they are shot in changes from stage to stage. To make the event feel “Old West” many of the stages are shot from small western town settings, from saloons to jails, from churches to cemeteries.
The score for each stage is the time to shoot it, so like golf, the lower the time, the better the score. Top shooters can easily clear an average stage in roughly 15 seconds. Slower shooters, like myself, get to enjoy the match a little longer!