Lesson from Pistol Competition

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.