Category: Shooting

Today is also the last day to vote for your favorite blogger to go to Blackwater with Todd Jarrett, and win a chance to go yourself.  It should be a pretty good time.  This time, instead of pimping myself, I’m going to ask if you haven’t voted for me, to pick some of the other bloggers who might need a few extra votes to push them over the top.  Some suggestions for bloggers who I think want to go but might need a few extra votes.

1. Keyboard and a .45
2. The Unforgiving Minute
3. Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease
4. Captain of a Crew of One
5. Rustmeister’s Alehouse
6. Sharp as a Marble
7. The Ten Ring
8. The View from North Central Idaho
9. Traction Control

These are the folks I think are interested in going, but aren’t likely lock-ins.  So if you’ve already voted for me, thank you.  If you still want to vote for me, knock yourself out, but please consider voting for some of the other blogs on the list.  The most important thing to do is vote, since that helps all blogs.  They are only asking for your e-mail for the purposes of the contest, and you don’t have to opt-in for recieving e-mail from them.

If you’re not on this list, it means I don’t think you’ll need much help, or didn’t realize you were interested, so I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not that’s a compliment or an insult.

Tonight is the last night to shoot the e-postal match.   I’m going to have to ask everyone who has results to e-mail them to me, if possible with a picture of your target.  I shot the match last night and scored a 10 out of 20 with my Ruger Mk.III with a Millett SP-1 red dot sight riding on top.  That’s about what I typically score outside, so this shoot is a pretty good approximation of the difficulty of the sport of silhouette.  I meant to shoot rifle silhouette, but when I pulled my .22LR rifle out of the case, I realized the bolt was missing, so I had to go home and search frantically for it.  I have found it, so I may go back tonight and shoot rifle.  You have until midnight to get your targets into me, but if you get them to me the next day, I don’t complain too much.  It’ll take me a few days to compile the score.

I did not manage to shoot air gun, as I had wanted to.  Just not enough time.

With the “common lawful use” test spelled out in the Heller decision, we’re going to want to eventually challenge the bans on assault weapons in California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Maryland and Connecticuit.  In order to do that, we need more than anectdotal evidence that AR-15s, and various other firearms outlawed under these state bans are, in fact, quite common, and are of the type protected by the second amendment.

So now that you’ve spend a lot of time and energy researching the decline in hunting, why don’t we think about ways to get our friends in California and New Jersey contributing to Pittsman-Robertson again by sending copious amounts of .223 and 7.62×39 downrange?

Anyone interesting in what went on today at the NSSF Summit should be following The Bitch Girls, namely the posts here, here, here, and here.  Also see Michael Bane’s latest posts covering the competitive shooting discussion group here, here, here, and here.

Josh has a different take on my Airsoft post earlier in the day.  I should note that when I was saying airsoft wasn’t a shooting sport, that wasn’t meant to suggest that airsoft guns don’t have utility as a training tool for shooting sports, or as a substitute for real guns in societies that don’t allow firearms ownership.  I own an airsoft Glock 19 that I use to practice quick draw.

When I said airsoft, what I mean is the game, similar to paintball, where you don equipment and shoot at other players.  The key component to a shooting sport is marksmanship.  You can mix up conditions by adding speed and tactical elements, you can even score based on these, but at the end of the day, a shooting sport should involve aiming at a target, and being scored based on your ability to hit it.

I should add that I’ve never played Airsoft the game, so maybe it’s a bit different than paintball, which I have played.  But the reason I don’t consider paintball a shooting sport is because marksmanship doesn’t matter.  Paintball guns just aren’t accurate enough to rely on anything other than volume of fire to hit something.  When I play paintball, I don’t even use my sights, I aim roughly, and just saturate the area the other player is in with balls, and hope one finds its mark.   To me a shooting sport depends, at the end of the day, on being scored based on your marksmanship ability.  I have little doubt, given my experience with airsoft guns, they could be use in shooting sports, but I’m not sure I’d consider the tactical game of airsoft one.

Michael Bane has a formal statement that has been issued by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.  Go have a read.  The meat of it is:

The NSSF has no intention of abandoning pistol shooters. Our very successful First Shots program is specifically designed and targeted to encourage pistol sports shooting. Much of the NSSF staff, including its new president, have been pistol shooting both recreationally and competitively for decades – and, in fact, some have worked in the handgun industry.

Good.  Now they just need to get away from this whole lethal, non-lethal crap, and I don’t think we have an issue here.

Bitter talks about the NSSF panel that discusses ways to overcome access problems for hunters and shooters.  I tend to agree that we both share some of the same problems, but my local indoor range does IDPA matches.  My club’s indoor range does Bullseye shooting.  We do share some of the same issues, but our issues are seperate.  Actually, we only really share access problems with hunters when it comes to rifle shooting.  When it comes to handgun shooting, access problems are significantly reduced.  But I forgot, handgun shooting is icky.  My bad.

Bitter is covering the NSSF summit.  Conclusion from the introduction to the report:

So, the webcast is over and there was absolutely no statement about these just being ideas.  Like I said, if I were watching that with out no other information from NSSF, I would believe that this document was their new gospel.

So does this mean the NSSF is now adopting action items that will marginalize the handgun shooting sports?  I think this is beyond misguided, it’s just plain stupid.

It looks like a bipartisan bill is being introduced in Congress that will making it a bit easier for the firearms and ammunition makers to make payments on their Pittman-Robertson tax obligations, which go to wildlife and conservation funding, as well as maintenance of public shooting ranges:

Earlier this year the industry marked an important milestone in its longstanding support of wildlife conservation. Manufacturers have since 1991 contributed more than $3 billion dollars to fund wildlife conservation through the payment of the federal excise tax. Since the inception of the excise tax in 1937, more than $5 billion dollars has been collected.

That’s a powerful reason hunters ought to be very interested in the health of the other shooting sports.  Shooters pay for a lot of wildlife conservation that benefit hunters through the payment of these excise taxes.

Bitter and I both talked with one of National Shooting Sports Foundation‘s public relations guys, the same guy SayUncle talked to, and he was emphatic that NSSF does not endorse the conclusions of that report.  This report was meant to throw out ideas, and the purpose of the summit was to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

From my point of view, I emphasised that NSSF needed to be careful.  In the age of the Internet, it’s very difficult to have much of any control over the means and rapidity that information is disseminated.  The old Internet adage that “Information wants to be free” very much applies here.

While I understand and agree the industry needs to be presented with new data and ideas, and debate the implications, it needs to, nonetheless, be very careful about what it puts its name on.   There was no indication in the report that the action items in the report weren’t endorsed by NSSF.  Add that to the fact that there were numerous items in there, because of poor choices of language, would be good fuel for the gun control movement, and you have a recipe for a big problem.  And that’s not even mentioning the damage that can occur from within the gun rights movement itself.

So I am glad to hear that NSSF is distancing themselves from these ideas.  I’m as much of a handgun shooter as I am a rifle shooter, so I appreciate that others in NSSF recognize the importance of those parts of the shooting community, and don’t seem ready to throw handgunners under the bus.