Lesson from Pistol Competition
Stress-testing your shooting skills
Pins fly as speed and accuracy with 9mm PCC are demonstrated.
It has been a long time since I was a serious competitor on the “pro tour” of handgun matches but I love it and still compete when I can. I think of it as a “pressure laboratory” — I’ve talked to a lot of combat and gunfight survivors who said they felt less pressure in a shootout than they did at the match.
Under Pressure
At the first Bianchi Cup in 1979, I shot on the same squad as my friend Jim Cirillo, the legendary NYPD Stakeout Squad gunfighter. As we walked between stages, he blurted, “Jesus Christ, I never felt this much pressure in any of my gunfights!” I asked him why and he replied, “There weren’t all these people watching you, and there wasn’t all this time to build up to it!”
Just as there are lessons learned in race car driving that can translate to the street in terms of both more-capable vehicles and more-capable “emergency drivers,” there are things you can learn from the competition arena. These things translate directly to real-world handgun needs, both life-saving situations like those of Cirillo — who said that the best gunfighters on his squad were the ones who shot matches — and to handgun hunters.
Note J.D. Jones, one of the all-time great handgun hunters, was also a champion-level shooter: The same was true of my fellow writers Mike Venturino whom we recently lost all too soon and John Taffin, who is thankfully still with us. Apart from our own motivations to shoot, it’s participatory journalism — we can share with you our own experiences in a “you are there” sort of way and with the info we get from observing and interviewing the winners
Bruce Barlow shot his first Pin Shoot with stock GLOCKs and was
called to the prize table twice. Expensive hardware not required!
On The Hardware Side
Let me focus on my favorite match, The Pin Shoot, which I’ve competed in 30 times now. Lessons include:
You don’t need a tricked-out gun as much as some think. This wasn’t my best year and my one trip to the prize table in “top 10” out of more than 170 shooters was in “Stock Gun.” This is where you can’t have compensators as in “Pin Gun” or optical sights as in “Space Gun” division. I shot a well-worn, out-of-the-box Springfield Armory Range Officer with a “street trigger” better than a customized, compensated Springfield with a “match trigger” and the same .45 ACP ammo. Part of it may have been that I had been carrying this gun daily and teaching with it for weeks before, and had a lot more rounds through it than the comp gun. I’d only had time to shoot the competition model enough beforehand to verify sights were point of aim/point of impact.
I wasn’t the only one, though. Patrick Sweeney had a great year, winning both Pin Gun and Stock Gun overall. He, too, shot his best with the stock gun. His winning time with the compensated pistol was 24.90 seconds to blast five heavy bowling pins off a table five times over, but his time with the un-compensated, harder-kicking stock gun was 23.80 seconds.
The lessons there? The gun you are most familiar with may give you your best performance, and sometimes the gun that’s harder to shoot forces you to focus better on the fundamentals.
Another lesson: As the novelist and hunter Robert Ruark famously said, ”Use enough gun,” to which I would add, use enough load. This year there was a five-pin event geared for 9mms in which the pins were set farther back on the table. However, lots of 9mm shooters found they still needed more than one shot to get the pins all the way off the rack. The winner of that match was Richard Hupp, using his preferred 8-shot S&W .357 Magnum revolver. Hmmm …
And don’t forget, carbines generally perform better than pistols. Winning PCC (Pistol Caliber Carbine) time was Brandon Schwenke’s 4.0 seconds for 13 pins versus Jess Christensen’s winning 9mm pistol time of 6.2 seconds for 12 pins.
Patrick Sweeney, seen here with a Springfield Echelon won
at the Pin Shoot, had a lot to do with creating the Stock Minor event.
Software Lessons
Practice for what you expect to need. I had been shooting cardboard targets in qualifications and demonstrations for students but hadn’t shot a bowling pin since “same time last year.” It showed in my sub-par performance. Decades ago cops learned one-handed bullseye practice ill-suited them for close-range gunfights and changed training accordingly. Smart hunters know groups fired from the bench don’t equal hits on game from standing positions. Same principle. Next year I’ll shoot some pins before the match.
The rule of gunfighting, “bring friends with guns,” holds true. I can’t quantify it because team scores don’t reflect individual members’ performance at the Pin Shoot, but I’m convinced when you shoot on a team, you try harder to support your comrades than you try for yourself. Every year, I seem to shoot better in teams than in individual matches and the principle seems to hold true in actual combat.
Bring more ammo than you think you’ll need. Every year, I see people with too few magazines getting flustered trying to refill them while the pin targets are being reset. It puts them under unnecessary pressure. I try to come to the firing line with enough full mags to invade a small island and it’s one less distracting thing to worry about. In the real world, similarly, no gunfight survivor has ever said “Gee, I wish I’d had less ammo when I was under fire.”
Give competition a try if you haven’t already. It teaches you things as you observe and correlate the performance of others — and yourself.
