Back in the winter of 2012, I was shooting Single Stack at the Sir Walter USPSA match, and walking around scoring the targets, we found just what you see above on one of them: a 230 grain FMJ stuck literally halfway through the target.

This provoked two questions. First, how the heck did this happen? And second, how the heck do you score it?

The answer to the first question turned out to be logical once we figured it out: the bullet had first skimmed the barrel that was partially obscuring the target, which robbed it of a lot of its velocity and presumably caused it to start tumbling. Then, it was actually the target stick behind the target, not the cardboard itself that stopped the bullet.

At first nobody was quite sure whether this counted or not. Someone either remembered, or pulled out a rulebook and found the rule that happens to govern this particular circumstance, which is not something that happens a lot. The rule, which as I recall is basically unchanged since then, in the current 2020 “Evergreen” rulebook is:

9.5.9 Hits upon scoring or no-shoot cardboard targets, must completely pass through the target to be considered a valid hit and count for score or penalty.

So there we had it: the bullet had not completely passed through the target, and thus was not scored as a hit. Charlie mike.