This week on the podcast, I discuss the differences between level one matches that are run as a stepping stone to shooting bigger matches as compared to ones that are the destination.

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The post #117: Stepping Stone Matches appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I continue the discussion from last week about lessons learned from the past two years of running a monthly outlaw match a local indoor range.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL. #uspsa #ipscshooting #ncsection #area6

Links:
– Triangle Action Pistol match video from May 2023

The post #104: Outlaw Lessons, Part 2 appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about the 2021 rules changes to Production and Carry Optics, and discuss the fact that the temporary lull in match attendance in the last two years is ending, and the need for USPSA to take the shortage of club match slots seriously for the health of the sport.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL.

The post #94: Matches Filling Up appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I cover all the rules in the March 2023 changes that you might run into at a match, as well as cover the interview that Scott Arnburg did 24 hours after attending his first board meeting.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL.

The post #93: Rule Changes (2023) appeared first on Berry Shooting.

I ran “Production Optics” style, shooting my Stock 2 with Sig dot on it, but with 15 rounds in my mags. I had to do an extra reload on 3 of the 5 stages, but to be honest, I don’t really care. Since it looks like I’ll be continuing to switch back and forth between CO and Production depending on the match, just sticking with the same Production-legal basepads for both guns makes life easier in a lot of ways.

My attitude at this point is that I’ll shoot Production any time there’s competition in the match, like at South Carolina where there was legit heat in the division. But I would have been the only person at this match shooting Production, which cuts into the fun factor. My live and dry fire practice will be with the Production guns, and basically I’ll pick up the dot gun for a match if it seems like the right way to go.

Anyway, these were my first rounds behind a dot since October, but it really didn’t seem to be an issue. Even with the EGW dovetail dot mount, I had zero problems finding the dot all day.

Most of the stages were pretty straightforward one-way-to-shoot-them affairs with just minor options in target engagement order. Stage 4, our first of the day, presented the option (that I took) to go to the back right corner first and then run to the back left and shoot the way around the rest of the stage. Watching the other shooters run it and comparing their times to mine, I think on this stage, saving the back right position to the end was slightly faster; the uprange movement took less time than moving into and out of that back right position, and the headbox-only target didn’t really give you any ability to shoot entering or leaving that back right position. I was obviously aiming quite hard on that stage and shot all alphas, even on the tight partials.

Stage 5 was all alphas as well, except for a barely-on-the-paper delta from starting to transition off the target as soon as I started to pull the trigger on the second shot. The other delta of the day (outside of the classifier) was on Stage 2, on a wide-open 5-yard target coming into position. That said, out of the 18 shooters in the match I was one of only two with no mikes on the day, which I take as a minor achievement. I definitely laid a few in the hardcover, but I made each of them up, which worked out well.

The classifier was a bit of a mess because of the extra two seconds it took to slowly press-press-press-press the DA with my weak hand. Ended up being an alpha, but the time hurt. Even without that though, it would have only been an 85%ish run, despite what I thought was a fairly blistering String 1. I haven’t been practicing very much this year, and one-handed shooting has definitely taken a hit.

Stage execution went as planned on every stage which was good. My main regret watching the video is seeing the gun jump around more than it should. While I was aiming on a lot of the tight partials, I tended to relax my grip, especially with the left hand. That will be something to work on in live fire as the year goes on.

The post True North USPSA – May 2022 appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This month, I decided to take out the Stock 2 with the red dot on an EGW plate and shoot a match with it. It’d been running well in practice, and I thought it would be interesting to take it to a pretty tough local match.

As I discuss at the end of the match video, I decided to shoot it with 15 round magazines, following on from last month’s match in “Production 15” (aka IPSC Production). In part because I was curious: there’s a lot of discussion about what the future of the US Carry Optics division should be, and I was curious to see in a match context what the difference between 15 and 23 rounds would be in stage planning. (I had to do an extra reload on 3 of the 5 medium or long courses of the day.)

The second reason, as you see at the end of the match video, is that the 23 rounders with the fancy Grams spring and follower kits just do not feed 147 Flat Point bullets. I know this comes with the territory, and I’ll switch bullet profiles to find something that will work with these mags if I choose to keep going with this setup. (The Glock 23 round mags fed the Flat Points just fine, strangely enough.) Also, the mags don’t reliably lock back, which I’m sure I can probably improve with Mr. Dremel. But this is exactly the kind of thing that is not interesting to me and I would prefer to compete in a division that didn’t require it. I’ve been shooting these Tanfos for 5 years now without changing so much as a magazine spring and they feed and lock back 100%.

If I have to change my gear and ammo to work in more finicky magazines, I’ll do it, rather than being the one curmudgeon who won’t stay with the times. But I still think it’s a bit pointless–capacity isn’t an advantage when everyone has exactly the same size magazines. If the purposes of equipment divisions is to establish various level playing fields upon which competitors can compete, then you can assume everyone will have the same gear. Why 140mm for CO? Why not 170? There is no defining reason except it seemed like a good idea at the time. In my opinion, the division is just fine with 15 round magazines, and much closer to actual practical applications. (The name “Carry Optics” is stupid to start with, but how many people carry their red dot gun with a 23 rounder under their T-shirt?)

Anyway, on to the stages.

I was happy with my performance overall, with one Delta and one No-shoot for the day, shooting 91% of points overall. (A few stages like 5 and 8 really dragged that down.)

Stage 8

As I was shooting, I was calling lots of second-shot charlies, but this was such a close, hoser stage I just couldn’t find it to slow down and aim more. Most of the CO guys didn’t have to reload on the 20 rounder, but I don’t know that it particularly slowed me down.

Stage 1a

A quick unloaded start short course that turned out to be a fun stage. I’m always surprised how short stages like this have a surprising number of ways to shoot them. At least on my squad, folks seemed to like it.

I had just a little hangup with the magazine going into the gun, but after that everything went well. The targets were open and only about 7 yards away, so all Alphas isn’t the hardest thing in the world, but I was happy with it.

Stage 1b

On this stage, a bad habit of mine bit me. I tend to start exiting positions early. My visualization was to start moving while shooting the third target, the open bottom target on the double stack. But as you can see in the third person, I’m shooting the top partial with a foot in the air. This was totally pointless from a movement perspective and certainly didn’t help control the gun.

I saw the dot dip into the white as soon as it went off and sent another one without hesitation, but still, I couldn’t take back the bad hit. I need to work on being patient and not actually starting to shift my weight or move until it’s actually time.

Stage 2

On this stage, I had to reload twice, because the way the stage was set up left 10 rounds from one spot in the middle. (In the design, the barrel was further uprange so you couldn’t see the two targets in the “alley” from one position.) I struggled with both reloads, just a lack of practice and reps on this gun with these mags. Definitely something to work on.

Stage 3

Everything went pretty much to plan here. The popper at the end not going down was from a low, partial hit that made a good noise but didn’t have enough juice to put the steel down. But I kept the gun up, so as soon as it looked like it was an issue, I sent another. So the recovery at least was good.

Stage 4

Another stage that went almost exactly to plan. I did my reload two targets later than visualized. Not exactly sure why I didn’t do it coming out of the port with the steel. I think I was focusing too much on hitting the spot on the fault lines to shoot the next 4 shots.

Stage 5

There was a good amount of discussion about this stage, and I chose the plan to shoot on the move around the side instead of posting up and shooting and then cutting through the middle. I think it mostly worked out, but the charlies ate me alive during the shooting on the move. Also, the last target, I was planning to pivot to, but with the PVC fault lines I didn’t know exactly where I was in relation to it. I ended up stepping back and being off-balance and shot falling out of the shooting area which I try to avoid whenever possible, for reasons like this. I called the bad shots as soon as I shot them, but it wasn’t worth getting back in the shooting area to make them up.

Stage 6

The left popper activated the left swinger, the right popper the right swinger, and the middle popper the left max trap, which in turn activated the right max trap. I chose what was actually a pretty safe plan, to hit middle-left-right and then wait for the max traps then shoot the swingers. (This is one of those stages where it really helps to get to see people on the squad in front of you shoot it, and we didn’t. I was third or fourth on the stage, so I had to pick a plan and go with it.)

I saw another shooter on the squad run the more aggressive left-middle-right plan and pick up the left swinger before the max traps. It was definitely faster and more aggressive, but with less margin for error. He shaved a second off the time (5.5 instead of 6.6) which is a huge difference when calculating a hit factor. If I’d seen it run that way before I shot, I’d know I would have had to match it.

CM 99-11 El Presidente

Bad draw with the gun hanging up in the holster because I pulled out instead of straight up, and a bad reload. Plus 4 charlies. I definitely have not been keeping my stand-and-shoot skills sharp the last few years, and it usually shows on classifiers.

The post Sir Walter November 2021 Wrapup – “Production Optics” appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I had Tyler Turner on to continue the discussion from last time about what the goals of the sport should be: shooters developing and getting better, or just more warm bodies in matches?

Here is an automated transcript of our discussion:

Ben: Tyler Turner. Welcome to Short Course.

Tyler: Thank you. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Ben: People who’ve listened to the previous episode, know that you are the one who kind of kicked off a discussion.

And this was shortly after the vote to remove Mike Foley and the discussion started to arise around what is important to keep from his time in office and what we should refocus on. And, you made a post that they made a couple of interesting claims and I wanted to give you some more space to elaborate on them.

So I mean the first one that, that probably I think is, is the most surprising one is you made the, the assertion that USPSA should actually really be interested in the development of shooters. That it shouldn’t just be about, did this guy shoot, you know, I’m putting words in your mouth, did this guy shoot 15-20 matches this year, but is he actually getting better? Is he developing?

Tyler: Yeah. And to me that that’s something that seems self-evident. I mean, this is the United States practice shooting association. We are made up of practical shooters, both pistol and cabine. if I’m not mistaken, I believe the bylaws explicitly say our role is t o encourage safe and fair shooting competition. And to me it just seems self-evident that one goal of our organization, would be that the people who are actually participating in our sport are improving as shooters. to me that seems, the whole deal, whether, a person is coming out to improve, defensive skills or just their gamer skills.

That seems to me to be the point because otherwise. What is, you know?

Ben: Well, yeah, so, I mean, so this is an interesting question. I, I, in fact, there was a, an article I want to say it was on the USPSA blog or something, you know, and it was tackling the question that, that it, it treated very seriously of, you know, is USPSA a sport or a hobby?

Um, actually I think the article said, is it a sport, a hobby or an activity? Which event?

Tyler: Event? Yep.

Ben: Where do you, yeah, where do you, what’s your thought on that? Why does it matter?

Tyler: Well, USPSA is a sport. , sports have events. You participate in a sport and you can choose your level of participation.

But I think if you start from the premise that USPSA is anything but a sport, you get these, these effects that we’re seeing you get these secondary and tertiary effects. I think it trickles down in the culture, which is something we can talk about now or later, but, to me, if you are running an organization whose purpose and goal is to foster competition to, set out a rule set for said competition. And you have winners and losers. To me, that’s a sport like any other, I think, this idea that there’s any confusion about what USPSA is speaks, speaks to the priorities and speaks to the mindset of, of previous administration. It speaks to probably the culture of our leadership, that this is even a question in their minds.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the question that seems like no one really has an answer to is, you know, what, what is the purpose of the organization? Is it, is it to maximize revenue or is it to maximize the development, like you were saying of the shooters? Is it actually to, to cultivate a community of people who are getting better and, and are being assisted in that process and are being given interesting challenges that, that help them raise their skills versus just, “Hey, here’s five stages and a classifier. Thanks for your fee. Have a nice day,”

Tyler: Right. Again, the self self-evident thing to me is that the organization itself should be interested in shooter development, that people are proving that they’re putting on good competitions at that they’re fostering competitive excellence.

I think it would be amazing if the organization if they acted like they have a vested interest in people improving, becoming better shooters over time, and taking steps, organizationally, structurally operationally, that reflected that priority. Instead of, to me, it seems that USPSA the organization is very interested in raw numbers. They are interested in revenue. They’re very interested in advertising. They’re interested in industry sponsorships and collaborations. To me, that’s the least interesting part. I, as a shooter, don’t get anything out of, the partnership with, and I’m, I’m not singling anyone out, but, Federal or whoever else to see that on the website, the Facebook page, that does nothing for me, but if we have an organization who’s keenly interested in making sure we’re attracting the absolute best shooters that we are approving matches and approving stages from the top down. This means from nationals to area matches to section matches to locals, to me that’s the obvious priority here. You kind of create your own demand when you are excellent. Anything that is excellent attracts people. It’s a magnet. And I, I just, it’s a different way of assigning that priority to me far from the flash, if things are organically excellent. You have culture that’s driven by excellence. You attract. What, in my opinion, you want in a sport.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, we, the USPSA shouldn’t be going to sponsors and saying, “Hey, please, you know, what, what would it take for you to be interested in us?” We should be so dominant, so compelling, everybody should want to be a part of us because we’re where the eyeballs are.

If your gear can make it in USPSA it can make it anywhere. You know, being able to say the USPSA national champion shoots this gun or uses this ammo or whatever that, that should, that should mean something. Whereas right now it feels like the sport is chasing the sponsors.

Tyler: Yeah. Certainly chasing dollars. And that may be, you know, dollars directly that may be dollars gained through activity fees, you know, the additional participation. To me, that’s the cart before the horse. If you want to gain organic, healthy growth make the sport, make the events within the sport excellent. Make sure the people already here, your membership are excellent. And be continuously improving on that element. And I, I feel like I should preface this because I think sometimes from past comments I’ve made or anything like that, I want to avoid the, to the extent I can, this elitist GM thing, because, uh, I don’t want anyone to have the perception that I don’t want D class and C class and B class, an A-class guys in the sport.

That’s not what I’m saying at all. some of my absolute best friends, some of the absolute best people in the sport, are D and C and B, and A. I don’t want a sport of GM’s and it’s okay.

Ben: It sucks shooting on a squad full of full of guys with big egos. I mean, it’s, it’s no fun. Yeah, for sure.

Tyler: But you can be a low B class guy and be entirely invested in the sport. You can volunteer, you can put on matches. You can RO your state match. I’m not talking about, you know, if you’re not a GM, then you’re not, you’re not squat. I’m talking about, I want people in the sport who care about it. They’re here to improve it. and It’s people who they want to know what they can do for the sport as opposed to what can the sport do for them a lot of times.

Ben: And we’re not talking about, you know, oh, it should all be, you know, 20 yard partials and super fast swingers, like that isn’t fun for good shooters any more than it is a, a B class shooter. Like a good stage is, is interesting as a challenge from D glass all the way up to GM. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be super hard, really good stages have elements that are designed for everyone.

So yeah, I’m with you. This isn’t that if you’re not a GM within four years of joining a sport, you know, you’re irrelevant or whatever. It’s not that at all. It’s just a question of, are people being motivated by, “Oh, I got some shiny new toy. Now this is what’s going to hold my attention for two months. Oh, I need a new toy. I need a new toy.” And, and, you know, we’ve all shot with those guys that always have something new. They’re always changing and they never get better because they never learn any one thing.

Tyler: Well, and imagine, imagine if our organization said something like, Hey, you know what, instead of doing that, instead of buying the new shiny toy, instead of constantly advertising, you know, the new hotness or this, that, or the other division, like what if they explained to shooters what they told them, the truth, which is, you know, if you change guns every two months, you’re always chasing equipment and chasing gear, you’re ignoring the important part. You’re ignoring , the skills that are actually going to improve you, you know, because the weak link in your shooting is not what gun you’re shooting this month, it’s not the holster you use. It’s you and here are steps you can take to improve yourself.

Like I just think that would be so refreshing in Front Site, but it’s not even called Front Sight, anymore, right? What if they had just a real talk article in there it’s like, “Hey, dummy, like take a class.”

Ben: Or even, I mean, even if it wasn’t something that they had to read, but something that became self evident. I mean, for example, if the classifier system was less of a, of a hit or miss based on, you know, is this an 18 series or a 99 series? Right? If you, if your classifier average actually moved in relation more to your skill than into the classifier selection and you could see, wow, okay. Every time I switched guns, my classifiers dropped by 3 to 4% and then they come back up to, you know, what, if they were actually measurable and consistent to that level, people could actually observe it in themselves. Whereas now they can always say, “Oh, well, you know, that one’s really shot up.” Or, you know, “I fumbled that reload.” There are always excuses. Right. Whereas if the classifiers were actually more consistent and uniform than, than that actually would be a signal to people like, “Hey, you’re not getting better, even though you feel like you are.”

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. But you know what, one last thing on, on the organization side, I think you talk about what you prioritize, right. And the priorities of the organization to me have been made clear both implicitly and explicitly over the last several years, which is we want warm bodies. We want participation. You know, we’re never going to breathe a word about, you know, improvement or the quality of our competitions or the stages or anything of that nature.

But Hey, we would love. You to buy some of our industry partners products, whether it be ammo or gear or guns, of course. To me, you, you talk about that, which you prioritize. And I think our priorities organizationally are

out of whack.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, when, when you have the president talking about the nine days of nationals and you know, he’s not saying it’s the highest quality, best stages, it’s, it’s that it’s the largest, right? It’s the largest practical shooting event, second, only to the World Shoot, like you said, like you can see right there that that’s the priority.

Tyler: Well, and I I’ve looked at, as far as I know, I’ve looked at every set of minutes, at least since the Foley presidency, probably, you know, some of the Strader I came in to the sport, like in the middle of the Strader administration, but I, I feel confident saying I’ve looked at every set of minutes.

I don’t recall, and this sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not, I don’t recall any metric of quality ever being referenced, but every, uh, metric I’ve ever seen has been related to participation and participation being raw numbers. And, and to me that’s not what this is about, or at least it’s not what it should be.

Ben: So this, this dovetails into something else that I think may have been a little bit surprising to folks in what you wrote, which is, and you, you you’ve been talking about growth. And I think we both agree that the sport needs to grow in a healthy, sustainable way, but then you talk about barriers to entry and that that having correct, proper barriers to entry in the sport is actually a good thing for the sport, even though, you didn’t say this, but I’ll sort of challenge you to say, you know, how do you, how do you balance that with the idea that the sport needs to grow?

Tyler: Yeah. And it’s, and it’s not ever a, a popular thing to say something should be more exclusive than inclusive. People are inclined to basically, on a knee-jerk basis, say inclusivity is a good in itself. Right? Like we, we shouldn’t stop anyone for coming out who wants to do this. The problem as I see it, and this is a nuanced thing, and, again, it goes back to the elitist thing, not my goal here, but my point is: the people who actually make it out to a USPSA match in the first place are, are a little bit strange, right? Because. It’s it’s a lot, both psychologically and equipment-wise and it’s like pulling teeth a lot of times to get people out to their first USPSA match, like who even knows what the statistic would be on gun owners in their lifetime who actually come out and shoot one USPSA match much less become like USPSA regulars or even lower odds of becoming a USPSA lifer. You know what I mean? So here’s the fundamental thing. We’re not broadcasting. Some people have it in their minds that anyone who’s a gun owner or anyone who’s an NRA member or anyone who contributes to the second amendment foundation should and would, and, and will come out to a USPSA match.

That’s not the case. We’re very much narrow casting here. The majority of gun owners either don’t know about us or have no interest if they did and coming out and running around guns for one reason or the other. Because we attract this odd subset of people. I think this premise that we need to be inclusive and that any, any person off the street with a Glock, you know we need to make it where they come out here is flawed because they’re not going to come out here.

I can tell you back in 2014, when I shot my first match I, I didn’t know anything about USPSA, but, I did know that there were certain rules. And so I got on the internet, looked up the rules, got a PDF, went through and said, okay. My, my stuff that I have, which was garbage by the way, I had like a Glock 17 in a retention holster, hooded level, free retention holster with battle belt.

Uh, yeah, so it’s not optimal, but I said, okay, I can fit here.

Ben: Well and we always want to have a place that someone, you know, whether it’s Limited or Open, where someone can show up with, with any, you know, with whatever set of gear and just finish their first match. We want, we want the sport to be inclusive in that way where you don’t have to be, you don’t have to go out and drop 2000 bucks to shoot your first match.

We’re not talking about barriers like that.

Tyler: Right? Exactly. I agree with you. But the, and you’re right on the point, because no matter what you have, unless it’s just totally unsafe unless it’s just an unsafe firearm, you can bring any handgun to USPSA and shoot it.

Ben: And that was true before the flashlights and appendix rules.

Tyler: Yeah, exactly. There’s always Open. So what I’m talking about in exclusivity is it seems to be the trend that we want to be all things to all people. And we want to cater to people’s wants and that if you want to shoot production but you also want a thumb rest and you also want a flashlight and you know, this, that, or the other well it’s, we should make it where if they want to shoot production with all those things, well, we’ll cater to that. And to me when you are, you know, bulldozing barriers to entry, you have the secondary effects you have a watering down a blurring of the lines between divisions. I’ll just give you a recent example and I haven’t fully digested this. This is just an observation of mine from the Georgia state match.

I was ROing a stage and as I watched shooter after shooter come through I can’t tell the difference between divisions anymore. And like I said, I haven’t digested this. I don’t know what conclusion to draw about that. Only to say that that’s, that’s what went through my mind when I saw these shooters come through, as I can’t tell the difference save for, you know, maybe optics or comp and Open everything looks the same. All these lines are being blurred. So. Yeah, I guess it begs the question. What, what are the purpose, uh, the purposes of divisions, what are the lines and why?

Ben: Well, and what are the purposes of each rule. So, you know, for example, something that, that people sometimes find hard to understand is in IPSC, you can use a race holster in Production and that’s seen as sort of counter-intuitive right? Isn’t Production supposed to be practical gear? The gun is, is still stock. It’s just, you don’t have to get a custom molded kydex shell for every single Production gun. You can have one race holster. So it’s more about, it’s not so much the raw speed. It’s about making it more accessible and people can say whether they agree or disagree with that rule.

You know, if you told me tomorrow that that race holsters were allowed in Production, I actually wouldn’t find that as much of an affront as say the flashlight thing, which is obviously just pandering to people who, who just make excuses. “Oh, I’d shoot USPSA. If I could have my flashlight on my gun,” it’s like, okay.

Yeah. But really whereas obviously allowing a $200 or whatever, a race holster costs, that’s not lowering the bar. It’s just making it a little more convenient for people who shoot multiple guns. Right. So there’s a logic there. But, you know, the thumb rest or, you know, flashlights it’s, you know, it doesn’t seem to be a, a logic or a thought process around enhancing competitiveness. It’s just about, well, if people want to do this, I mean, it’s a freestyle sport. What’s the downside and…

Tyler: yeah, well, it’s, it’s, it’s a permissive attitude and it’s not just for equipment rules, it’s it seems to be this culture and attitude of permissiveness and anything goes that, that permeates through the sport.

And it has these secondary and tertiary effects that I talked about because, you know, it creates at least the perception that the rules are arbitrary, that they’re they’re open, that anything is open for discussion. There’s nothing that’s hard and fast and fundamental. Everything is, it’s just a matter of you know, you can pick and choose.

And I think that has very real effects for, you know, the actual competition rules, the actual, you know, between the beeps type of stuff. Because if you, if you create this a permissive culture, where the rules, if not, um, breakable or are at least perceived as flexible or arbitrary, you create a situation and a culture, more importantly where what rule isn’t?

Ben: Yeah, the, the sport needs credibility, right? It’s like, okay, why, you know, why was two ounces plus or minus the, the weighted the listed weight. Okay. But then two became poor. Why for, you know, what’s the, if there’s not a logic underneath the rules, then it, like you say, it just, it feels like it’s, it’s just arbitrary and it can be changed.

Whereas if you try and say, well, you know, two ounces is, you know, maybe grips and a base pad or something, it’s, it’s a common variance then then it feels like the rules are actually built on a solid foundation versus just being what some fudds with 1911 in leather holsters wrote down in 1976, which was very little of what the rules are.

But yeah, when you say, oh, you know, all the rules need to change because they’re not up with the times, man. It’s like, well maybe, maybe they’re timeless. Maybe they don’t need to change because you know, whatever it is is a, is a passing fad. Maybe it’s not right. Yeah. I think red dot optics on handguns are here.

Tyler: Oh, yeah. Carry optics is a great example of true innovation, organic innovation and changing of the times. I mean, that’s here to stay. That was a response to organic demand within the, the market. That’s a good example of changing for a very concrete, specific reason to me, more so than any, any specific equipment change, you know, say let’s just use flashlights cause that’s recent, and a good example, that doesn’t give me nearly as much heartburn as this perception that I think is created by these, the constant rule changes the constant catering to to whims like you said, that that don’t have a basis in logic. I’m very concerned about the culture that creates, you know whereas I’ve mentioned they’re seen at the rules are seen as, as arbitrary open for discussion open for flexibility, you know, this is, this is how we get these, you know, the club match rules in air, I’m making air quotes, club match rules. And that’s not good for the sport. I mean, the, the hallmark of USPSA is that you can show up anywhere, any state, if they run USPSA in a foreign country, you can show up at, at a USPSA match and know exactly what you’re getting into.

I think this, this has a way of trickling down, getting into the collective psyche of the sport and it can’t be good. There has to. Some sort of fundamental principles on which, you know, we’re, we, we rely and to me the, the constant, the actions of leaders, I’ll put it this way, the actions of leadership don’t seem to be founded.

They don’t seem to have any sort of a basis on logic or a clear delineation and purpose.

Ben: It lacks vision.

Tyler: Yeah, it, it, it lacks vision.

Ben: Here’s the sport we want to build, let’s lay the bricks to build it. It’s kind of like, oh, what do you think about flashlights? Yeah, those are okay. Oh, what do you think about aftermarket hammers? Yeah, those are okay. And then you incrementally get yourself to a place where like you say all, all the divisions kind of blur together and you know, what’s the point of any of them?

Tyler: Yeah. And I, and I think that, I think we really are making it up as we go along and that can’t be good. It can’t be good. There’s, there’s gotta be a plan, you know? We’ve just like gone Superman off the cliff, there’s no slippery slope, we just like threw ourselves over the cliff. You know, one thing after the other through these constant rule changes. They’re not good for any, any organization. But especially a sport like ours that relies like the one thing the central org is to do is to clearly establish a rule book and maintain that.

And the constant change, without a clear basis, it just, it’s not good.

Ben: And I mean, this has to be, it can’t be separated from the fact that, I mean, for almost the whole time I’ve been in the sport. I mean like, like you, when I joined the president was Phil Strader, he’s a grand master shooter, but you know, since then no one on the board has been particularly high level as a shooter.

I think Foley was -is M in a couple of divisions, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s not terrible, but he’s not he’s not to that… he’s not a nationally competitive shooter and he never was. And so the fact that there isn’t even a single voice, right? You, you, at board meetings, it’s not even like there’s one person elected to represent the GM’s, right.

I mean, you know, we want to talk, talk weird reforms, you know, you can imagine just having one guy there who, you know, represents at the very least that the high end of competition and the board meetings have been, have been devoid of that, for at least five years, six years. I mean, I still have an email from Foley where I was I think it was about the hammer, the hammer changes.

And he’s like, I’ll make sure this, this view is uh, represented to the board at the next meeting. It’s like, okay. Yeah, you don’t care. You’re you’re not going to do anything. And so that voice isn’t being heard in, in the halls of power of our sport,

Tyler: Right. No, you’re you’re right. If anyone on the board listens to this and is offended, I’m terribly sorry, but like you said, I’m not aware that anyone on the current iteration of the board or in recent memory has been a high level competitor or is you know, they’re certainly active in sport.

I, I know we have they may be high level by, by a letter classification or they may, you know participate in a lot of matches, but I don’t know that these types of concerns are being discussed. Because look, I don’t know where flashlights came from. Like, I don’t know who was like clamoring, like, oh, flash light ,this was apparently a priority for the board and our N ROI. Whereas popper calibration, it just. today has been, it has been addressed and I’ll just leave, leave it alone, whether or not that was good or bad, but just today. So you’re telling me getting, we got to get flashlights in these holsters. We got to make it have to run.

That was a greater priority to our leadership than, you know, fixing proper calibration or during that.

Ben: Until proper calibration had swung the outcome of a national championship. How, how important was it? Right? When, when you get egg on your face, right, then people start to start to scramble, you know? But yeah, before that it was, it was just a bunch of GMs whining about, you know, Hey, this steel isn’t being reset properly, but then, you know, once, once it becomes a public embarrassment for the organization and calls legitimacy of the, of the championship into question, well then heads start to roll, so to speak.

Tyler: Well, and I, I think that’s how I think that’s how criticism is, is taken by our leadership. I think they really believe it’s a handful of, of GM’s, whiny GMs, who don’t like these things, and otherwise it’s not a real problem. It’s just a handful of people talking about, I really think that’s how these issues are perceived in the board and in NROI, they’re dismissed. But I’ll ask this kind of a rhetorical question, like who, who has either the most to gain or the most to lose, like then the highest level competitors in sport. They’re the most invested they’ve got the most on the line. I think they, I think you would agree that they, they have the skin in the game, the most direct view of these issues, you know, if you’re shooting, you know, 6, 7, 8 majors a year, you shoot nationals every year, I think you probably got a pretty good finger on the pulse of the problems and the issues within the sport.

Ben: Yeah. No. I mean, it means a lot to me, like, you know, when we’ll run the North Carolina state match and we’ll get compliments from people who’ve traveled overseas and shot, you know, matches all over the country, and in some cases around the world and they’d say, okay, like, this is, this is good. Like, that means something right. That view, that experience, that context, you know, if all you ever shoot is, is your state match, your area match, and then, you know, nationals, that that’s not necessarily a very broad pool to draw from.

And so, you know, there are people with this experience, there are people who have gone to world shoots, there are people who have shot, you know, some of the Extreme Euro matches that are, I think, held up as, as some of the best matches in this sport today. And we’re not listening to them. You know, those people are told, sit down, shut up. nationals don’t want to hear from it. W you know, we need to get more warm bodies in the internationals.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I just, again, another self-evident thing and maybe it’s just me. Maybe I really am just an elitist ass. But yeah, it just seems, it seems crazy that you would rather bring someone into the sport who won’t participate until they get it just the way they like it. You are making changes, you are inviting these people here, you are valuing them more than you’re valuing the, the Uber invested, the, the, the live breathe, eat, sleep USPSA guys. I mean, because effectively that’s what the actions are saying. Is that we want these people, you, you guys, you elitists, you just do your thing, stop bitching. You know, we want people who will only shoot the sport if they get a appendix carry with their flashlight in Production division.

Ben: Yeah. Because yeah. Well, cause we’re where are we going to go? You know, we’re, we’re a captive audience, so they’re sure they’re out beating the bushes, trying to get, you know, the, the marginally invested people in, when, you know, obviously that is, that is, as you say, a good, a good way to sort of drive out and demotivate the people who, who really invest, uh, the balance of their free time in the sport.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, as a related point to the earlier comment about not being able to tell, the various division guns apart, it, it made me feel in that moment, like, I just, I don’t give a shit about division rules. It’s like, I’m not going to, I’m not going to enforce anything. There’s no incentive any longer for me to do that because if everything is permitted, what does it matter?

Like before I was motivated as an RO when you could readily tell the difference between divisions, you could tell what belongs in Production and what doesn’t. So it’s, it’s ironic, that by, by allowing anything it’s actually created an unenforceable situation.

Ben: Well, and, and you just, you don’t know if, what you learned in RO class a year ago, two years ago, you know, six years ago, like is even still accurate, you know? Yeah. There was a, yeah, there, there was a situation at the state match, uh, I think it was last year where we, you know, they were calling out to, to pull bags and the rule, that I had learned it in RO class was you pull bags at the end of the squad.

And so I’m like, all right, well, we’re going to keep going until the end of the squad, the Range Master pulls up, and he’s like, no, pull them off right now. Apparently that rule had changed at some point, and there was no, maybe, maybe I missed a change log, but, you know, they only post the most recent one.

You can’t see the change log going back to the last time. So, you know, at that point I was like, I was firm in, I knew what the rule was and I was going to follow it because I was trying to be a good CRO. And this evergreen rule book, you know, made a, made a fool… now, you know, 10 people on the range saw and nobody, nobody was that worried about it.

But I just, at that, that, that, that was, that was my eye-opening moment where I was like, wow, can I trust my memory of any rules anymore? And the answer is no, I have to check it every time. And that’s, that’s a frustrating place to be as someone who wants to help the sport.

Tyler: That’s right. I mean, that’s, that’s a good example of these cascading effects where you’ve, you’ve removed my incentive to keep a keen eye on, you know, these types of issues and it encourages well, yeah, whatever. I mean, maybe it’s this iteration of the rulebook. Maybe it was two or three ago. It’ll all get sorted out in the wash. You know what I mean? Like if, if, if you are ROing or CROing constantly and you know, within a year or a period of years the rule book has changed that many times, you don’t know which one you’re you’re working from, you don’t know which one current one is, and you’re just sort of de-incentivized and de-motivated to, to track that black and white of the the letter of the law, at least that, like I said, that was my very recent experience is I just lost any interest in policing that because, at this point, anything is permitted. It just doesn’t matter.

Ben: Yeah. And I think, I think when, when the sport is, you know, obviously you are someone who’s very passionate about it. You spend a lot of time in this sport. I’m not, I haven’t invested as much but, uh, you know, we we’ve spent, we both spend a lot of time in the sport and, when it’s starting to lose us, the guys that most want to do what’s good for the sport and want to be proponents of it, something’s going wrong and we need to, we need to turn around. So

Tyler: Yeah. Well, you know, I don’t see me or you or any of the other top guys, pro shooter, like none of us are shooting Jesus. Like, no one is and no one should, you know, rely totally on what a GM says, just because they’re GM of course. But I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s noteworthy at least, you know, if you’re creating, if you’re actively creating disincentives to either participate at the level you, you otherwise would or as a CRO, because I can tell you ROing is near and dear to me because I shoot and I take the shooting so seriously, I’m super invested in my performance. It, it also affects the way I CRO because I know how important it is. I know how a missed call, you know, a Charlie to an Alpha one, or, you know, missing a no shoot or missing a hard cover hit, I know that stuff matters and it can turn the result of a match. And so I’m when I CRO or RO I’m very invested in that. And I hate feeling that you know, my effort in that way is diminished or, you know, it doesn’t really matter. All this boils down to is culture. And I’m very concerned about the culture that has been cultivated, these last few years. There are people who’ve been in the sport decades longer than I have. You know, so comparatively, maybe I haven’t been around the sport that long, but even in the short time that I’ve been in the sport, you can sense and you can see, and you could feel these changes and they’re not… it doesn’t bode well, and that, that makes me sad because so much of my life is…

Ben: We both want this sport to be healthy for, for decades and something we can hand down to, to the next generation in good shape and are on a strong foundation.

Yeah, no, I agree. And that’s, that’s why I wanted to have you on and talk about these things and, yeah, this is by no means the end of the conversation. You know, one of, one of the announcements in the meeting board meeting minutes, it just came out as, I guess, that the special election is on hold until they can figure out how they’re going to re re-imagine the role of President.

So we have a while before that election happens, but that that’s, that’s kind of what spawned this. I want to, I want people like you, that, that wouldn’t normally have a chance to be heard to be heard. Cause I think you have a lot to add, so I appreciate your time, man.

Tyler: Thank you. I will make one last comment since he brought it up on the board.

Don’t you find it interesting that now, now, now they’re ready to like do board of director things, that they’re like authorized and mandated to do the bylaws. Like only just now, not at any point during the Foley presidency, but when he’s gone now, we’re going to make sure that the president doesn’t have too much authority. Like it just…

Ben: It is very strange timing. Indeed. Absurd is a good word. It is indeed. All right, man. Well, thanks for taking the time. It was good talking to you and uh, we’ll uh, talk to you next time.

The post #76: Tyler Turner on Participation vs Development appeared first on Berry Shooting.

You might think I was itching to go back to the heavy steel guns after the punishing 9mm recoil in a twenty-something ounce Glock. But the reality is, the main thing I noticed coming back was just how much more substantial the Tanfos felt in hand. It’s a totaly subjective thing, but the Glock just never got to the point of feeling nice in the hand. It is brutally efficient and cost-effective, but it does lack a certain heft and quality that the Itallian Stallions have. It’s totally intangible, but I was excited to dry fire with them again, where the Glock always felt a bit like a chore. Does it shoot any better? Not especially. But there’s something to be said for picking pretty much any viable gun as long as you’re excited about it and motivated to put in the time to improve with it.

So anyway, I wasn’t really all that excited about shooting a low-cap match, so I decided to dust off “Production 15” and register for the match in Limited Minor. My gear would have roughly fit IPSC Production, with no externally visible modifications, gear behind the hip bone, and 15 rounds in my mags. It saved me a reload on most of the stages. But more interestingly, it just meant that on stages like 4, you were able to shoot leaving one position and entering the next one without having to stick a load between. Is that more “interesting” than the “stage planning” that some people claim to enjoy with ten rounds? Not to me, but opinions vary.

Stage 8

First stage of the day, second time I’d been shooting with iron sights in months, so I was confirming the sights a little more than usual, especially on the partial targets in the first half of the stage. In the first position, the safer plan would have been to draw to the steel with the DA trigger pull and then shoot the partial and leave. However, I knew it was very realistic to draw to a close distance, high-risk partial and get two alphas on it without that much real jeopardy. I intended to shift my weight a little more as I was shooting the steel to start to leave, but that didn’t quite happen. I still would have shot that order again though.

And then the second half of the stage was just fun shooting and moving. I knew I was shooting to 14 and didn’t want to sling a bunch of makeup shots, so it all worked out just fine.

Stage 1A

This was a 12-round short course of my design. It and Stage 1B were the result of me designing target arrays outside of the permanent plate rack in the bay and then realizing they were better as separate short courses rather than being strung together with a sprint in between. (I will also admit that knowing I didn’t have to stick a load in these was part of the draw for shooting 15 rounds at this match.)

I was genuinely surprised at how many interesting ways there were to run such a “simple” stage. The whole stage hinged on the central array of steel where the big poppers blocked the small one from either end of the shooting area, but it was wide open from the middle. As should always be the way when you design a stage, I had a few different ideas of ways to shoot it, but until I stood there on the ground, I didn’t have my mind up how to shoot it.

I settled on a strategy that emphasized railing fast shots on 3 of the 4 paper from standing, shooting the big poppers rolling out of position, and take the mini and the last paper from the end. I am completely happy with my execution.

Stage 1B

This short course didn’t really have as many options since you pretty much shot everything left to right or right to left (with the middle array shot reverse of that). But it tested the specific skills required to execute either the left-to-right or right-to-left stage plan. There were also basically two different approaches to the left array of three targets: open-partial-open and roll out on the last open, or open-open-partial to “ride the recoil” up the stack. I chose the first plan and would stick with it every time. (You may notice this array of an open target next to an open-noshoot-partial stack shows up in my stages fairly regularly. I think it’s a challenging array that offers some interesting options in approaching it, and use it often. Especially in these small bays, having that open-partial stack can add some real interesting shooting without taking up much space.)

The other gotcha of this stage is that the middle “array” was really not one array. The right target was visible half a step from where you shot the left array, and the left target with the no-shoot on it was visible a half step away from where you shot the right hand target. So although this stage on paper looks like three arrays and three positions, it really is more like two wide positions that you roll out of/in to.

I called a bad shot on the first target and went back to make it up before rolling out of position, which put me a little ahead of myself, and on the fourth target, by the time I went to take my second shot, I was losing most of the A zone behind the barrel. I just shot the charlie and moved on, since the time to get the alpha would not possibly be worth it. So in that sense, going too fast cost me points, but not in the usual sense folks mean it.

At least on my squad, the combination of the two stages was a well-liked, unusual challenge. Everyone wanted another shot at one or the other of the short courses, which just serves as yet another reminder that you don’t need 32 rounds, or even 20 rounds to make a challenging, interesting stage.

Stage 2

This was also a stage of my design, a bit of a hail mary attempt to see how much of a field course I could pack into this tiny bay. It turned out fairly well, but I heard the build crew had some challenges getting the angles right.

Aside from the the folks that ran through the barrels and shot the front section left-to-right, pretty much everyone had to run the stage in the same general order. The main choices came down to choosing your target order, hitting the right spots, and blending the middle positions.

My main execution error was right after the reload. My plan was to shoot open-partial-open and start shifting my weight on the last target. As it was, when doing the wide transition, my eye snapped to the open target and I shot it first, meaning I had to stay planted for the partial. That led to pushing out of position a little hot leading to being off balance on my toes for the last two targets. Not ideal, but fine.

The other choice I suppose was whether to shoot the tight lean in the first position first or last. You could move into position, shoot that difficult target, and then unwind from the lean a bit to shoot the rest. Or you could do what I did, which is move in, lean more as I shot, and then just drop step out of position. I don’t find myself doing a lot of drop steps, but this is an instance I deliberately chose it as a strategy (also knowing I didn’t have to reload leaving that position). It worked out as planned.

Stage 3

The fourth target here was the main source of debate, of whether to shoot it on the way back, or to take it while moving forward to the middle of the stage. Walking through the stage, I made the choice that I would shoot the first three targets backing up, and by the time I was done with the third target, the fourth one would only be two steps away. Rather than turning my body just to turn back, I just visualized keeping my hands on the gun, carrying that momentum, and having a little patience until the target came into view, shooting it, and only then turning to move uprange and make the turn around the corner.

You also had the choice to shoot the open paper at that back left position coming into the position or leaving it. It seemed pretty clear to me that I was going to be trailing the gun coming in, so it was better to take it leaving. I also told myself it would give me a chance to be sure the popper was falling before leaving. As you can see in the video, after shooting it, I hesitate and look at the popper, so my plan became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cost a few tenths, no big deal, but it was less than ideal.

The middle position of the stage went more or less as planned. The only exception is the stupidly risky way I shot the double swinger. I had visualized putting two shots on each target in one pass each. But as you can see, as I transitioned to the swinger, instead of aiming at the target that was coming into view, I tried to squeeze in a shot on the one that was going away. (This is a pattern that will show up later and I need to knock the hell off.) As you can see, I shoot 1-2-1. Even having made the mistake of shooting the one quick shot before the target swung out of view, I should have assumed that shot was a miss and put two shots on it on the second exposure like I had planned. (As it was, it was a lucky delta so I escaped a miss. But I can see how unhelpful my strategy was and how close to disaster it put me.)

The last thing worth noting on this stage is that the last four targets looked on paper like two separate positions. But as you can see from my run, if you moved far enough, you only had a take a step while doing the wide transition between the outside targets and they were basically one position. It doesn’t come up all the time, but often enough it’s worth looking to see if you can skip shooting on the move by just moving a little bit more (while reloading, if you have to) and then post up in one spot and shoot a bunch of targets.

Stage 4

This stage was a bit of a memory stage, and I visualized it as many times as I possibly could. Ironically, somehow I ended up thinking in the second position that I hadn’t shot all 8 shots I was supposed to take from there, thus my hesitation leaving position. Once my conscious mind kicked in, it said to trust the plan and just get out of there.

There were a few different ways to approach the first two positions, but almost all of them benefited from not having to reload between them.

I shot the stage all As, but with 3 makeup shots, which my rule of thumb says adds roughly a charlie’s worth of time. This is a useful heuristic for analyzing stages. Even if you shoot a hard cover mike and make it up with an alpha, you’ve still incurred some extra time that you can’t get rid of.

Stage 5

This stage was pretty wide open, and the 13 shots on the left side certainly presented the option to shoot on the move all the way through, right from the start position. Not being totally confident with the iron sights, and knowing I had 16 rounds in the gun, I opted to just run over, post up, and shift around to get the few targets that were hidden by barrels. I think that was the right play. If I’d had the dot and 23 rounds on tap in the gun, I think shooting almost the whole thing on the move would have been the play (and same goes for Limited and Open, of course).

The middle section required hitting a fairly specific spot and pretty much staying there until you were done shooting. That went well.

The mini-poppers at the end I remember feeling like they were painfully slow. But for being at 15ish yards and shot from a bladed-off stance with 16 rounds to shoot 13, I’m pretty happy with that part of the stage. It could have gone much worse.

Stage 6

This stage I executed pretty much how I visualized it. The first swinger was so fast I was only going for one shot per pass. I will admit being surprised how long it took for the swinger to come out, but there was zero to do except sit there and wait for it.

My plan on the second swinger was to go for two shots on one pass. But like on Stage 3, I got greedy and tried to sneak a shot in while it was mid-swing, rather than just waiting for it to come out and give me a good presentation to execute my plan. Luckily I did put two shots on it after that first one, but still ended up with a charlie and a delta on the perf. Lots of room for improvement.

I need to retrain myself when I see swingers in the match to plan not to try to transition and get a shot off in the middle of a swing. Just move the gun over, get ready for when I get a good full presentation.

CM 09-13 Table Stakes

Not much to say here. The load went okay, but I got the left hand grip was just not quite right after bringing it down. The gun was flipping a lot more than usual, but I was timing it pretty okay. On the very last shot, I was breaking the shot as the gun was coming out of recoil and was just a few hundredths too late as the front sight went from target to no-shoot. Clearly my unloaded starts need some work, but to be honest I wasn’t too worried about it. For my first match back on the gun and the iron sights, I was happy with the overall result.

The post Sir Walter October 2021 Wrapup appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This is a lightly-edited transcript of the episode.

Welcome to Short Course, Episode 75 for September 22nd, 2021. I’m your host, Ben Berry. I know this podcast has been a little sparse recently. I’ve been taking all the content that normally would be these solo episodes and writing them up as blog posts, which has been a generally a good thing. It’s been working out.

And I see that continuing. But as we’re in an interesting chapter for the sport, I thought it might be an interesting chance to take the podcast and turn it into something a little bit different. A short form interview show. Having 20 to 30 minute conversations with people who I think have something interesting to add to the conversation.

And this episode is the first. It’s an experiment. I learned a lot doing it, and hopefully I’ll be doing a lot more soon. Things are as busy as ever with me, so no promises on a schedule, but hopefully there’ll be more of these forthcoming. My guest for this episode was Mason Lane and we get into his bio at the top of the interview.

But the only thing I will really add is don’t assume that I agree one hundred percent with everything he says. We have a lot of overlap in our thoughts, but, I think everyone has something different to offer. And that’s okay. I don’t intend to, or want to agree a hundred percent with everyone I talk to on the podcast.

I just want people who wouldn’t normally have a way to have their voice be heard because they don’t have a podcast or blog or something like that. I want them to have a voice and to be able to contribute because a lot of these people are people who are out actually doing the job. They’re teaching classes and shooting matches and they don’t have time to do things like host a podcast. And so if I can give them an outlet to put some of their ideas out there and contribute to the conversation as we go into this upcoming election, then that’s mission accomplished for me.

So I look forward to talking to and sharing as many as I can. It definitely won’t be as many as I would like, but it’ll be as many as I can manage. So here is the first to, hopefully, more short course interview podcasts. Thank you for listening.

Ben: Mason Lane, welcome to Short Course.

Mason: Thank you very much.

Ben: You and I, we’ve talked over the years. I think we did an episode or two of the Shoot Fast Podcast together, but, for those who have not heard anything you’re on, what’s your sort of quick bio? I mean, you, you shoot a lot. It’s basically your living at this point, right? How do you see yourself as a shooter?

Mason: I define myself to people who ask is a semi-professional. So I shoot a lot of matches, some successfully. I have some sponsors and stuff, but I make most of my money from teaching other people how to shoot better. The sport is something that’s near and dear to my heart. I’ve been shooting for almost 10 years now.

Ben: And you’re GM in a couple of divisions. I think you’ve got a limited title under your belt? You’re the guy who shot one handed for like most of a year?

Mason: Yeah, I’ve done some cool stuff over the years. I’m a GM in a few divisions. I won the nationals last year, which was cool. I shot two nationals with one hand once, which was cool.

Ben: Okay. So for those folks out there who may not be up on the details right now we’re recording this in September, 2021. The vote came down from the board. Mike Foley is out Sherwyn Greenfield is acting President. And at some point in the future, there will be a special election to elect someone to serve out the rest of this term. And in the meantime, approximately everyone and their mother has said they’re running for President. That’s about the whole of it?

Mason: Yeah. That’s, that’s pretty good to know.

Ben: So the reason I kind of wanted to get you on the call, and hopefully others in the future, is this really is a sort of crossroads for the sport. I think a lot of people were sort of united in being frustrated with the way things were going. But now the challenge is to build a consensus about what we want instead. You know, it’s easy to be against things. But, we want to talk about where we want to see the sport actually go, not just where we want to pull it back from. And I saw a pretty interesting exchange that you had signal boosted. And I just wanted to riff on that because I thought there were some good points made, and I know you are someone who takes this stuff seriously.

Like I said, obviously you compete, but there isn’t that much money in the actual competition right now. It’s much more in the teaching. But you are someone who’s passionate about the sport and want it to succeed as a sport, not just as a hobby and something people do on the weekends. Is that, is that a fair statement?

Mason: Yup. I poured a lot of time into it to not make very much money, which should tell you how much I like it.

Ben: Exactly. So what kicked this off was an exchange that, like I said, you had signal boosted. Somebody had posted an Instagram story and then someone else, a mutual friend of friend of ours, Tyler Turner, had responded to it. And, I just wanted to kind of read that out because I thought what was said on both sides was, was a pretty cogent take on, I think, what are two emerging viewpoints.

Ben: And then, like I said, just riff on that for a bit. So the original post. And again, this was a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t know this guy who made the original post, so it’s not really relevant who he is, but like I said, this is a pretty comprehensive take of one side of the view, which says:

“I understand and advocated for the need to make a change in USPSA leadership.

At the same time, I also acknowledge that the previous president did a lot of good things for the sport, spearheading Carry Optics, PCC, and more. We stand at a crossroads and begin the process of picking new leadership. Don’t undermine the good that was done and pick a regressive Fudd that will make the first order of business banning flashlights or appendix carry.

We need to continue the positive rules changes to modernize the sport and increase participation. Don’t let this positive event become a move by entrenched elites to undo the good that has been done in the sport.”

So Tyler says: “Not a good take. This fails to recognize that the modernization of rules and insane focus on participation was entirely an artificial agenda to achieve personal financial gain.

Don’t be fooled into thinking any of this progress was done for the good of the sport. We need a president who prioritizes competitive excellence above all else. Ironic that the author thinks we’re in danger from regressive entrenched elites, when that’s exactly what the Foley administration represented. The standard for our sport should not be how many warm bodies we can pack into a match.

We ought to be acutely concerned with the quality of our competitions and, unpopular opinion time, the quality of our competitors. Higher barriers to entry result in higher quality members and investment in the sport. The org should be concerned with shooter development and performance. The org itself should care more that its members are improving as shooters instead of what cool new parts they get to bolt on their guns.”

Maybe that’s the place to start what’s the problem with flashlights and appendix carry? It seems like we’re just making the sport more inclusive. I know this issue is kind of been debated to death, but for someone who hasn’t heard, what’s the issue? Why was adding those things to the Production and CO rule set not helpful to competition?

Mason: In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with any individual rule change you can make almost completely. So, take flashlights, for example, take addition of Carry Optics or PCC as that guy addressed, take the belt positioning rules, none of those things in isolation are necessarily bad for competition, right?

People will say, “Hey, why are you so against flashlights?” I can tell you, it’s not because I’m afraid that I’m going to get beat by someone with a flashlight. It’s because of the fact it doesn’t contribute to the benefit of the sport in any way. And it’s intended to try to bait more people end up participating, which isn’t really what we need to be doing at all, really.

Ben: So why is that? Why is it, as Tyler says, why is, why is the sport actually healthier with not necessarily arbitrarily high barriers to entry, but correctly calculated, meaningful barriers?

Mason: Because we don’t have the carrying capacity as far as the number of clubs and resources that we need to support every gun owner in America being a USPSA member right now. If we just blindly increased participation numbers, we’re going to run into some issues. So having some barriers to entry that are going to encourage people who are really serious about competing or who take one look at USPSA and say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that’s what I want to do.

Not someone that needs you to bend the rules to make them want to be a part of it. If someone showed up to a match and they had a Ruger Mark Three or something like that, it’s like, “Hey man, we really we’re glad that you’re interested, but, uh, you can’t use that here.”

“Oh, well, why not?”

“Because it’s not going to knock down our steel and it’s going to be obtuse for the match flow. And that’s just not what we’re going to do. If you really think this is cool, you should get some gear that will work for this, or borrow some from someone and come back and do it.” And if that guy says, “Nah, I think I’m okay,” then the support wasn’t for him to begin with. And frankly, people that don’t care about the sport enough to even go get or borrow gear that makes sense for the divisions that we have, they probably don’t really need that much political power to be influencing, the rules and systems that we have in place.

Ben: Yeah. The idea being you want to take of all the potential candidates that might come in, you want to basically weed out the ones who just aren’t that interested.

Mason: Yeah. And so what you’re going to hear from what this guy alleges is the elite, right? I assume you and I both fall into that category because we’re pretty staunchly anti- most of the stuff that he purported as benefits of the previous administration. I think that’s probably going to be where the two ideological lines are drawn, right between people that are under this impression, that progress comes from the form of packing people into matches and people that believe that, as Tyler alluded to, the quality of competitions and the quality of engagement of shooters is the most important thing that you can value.

Mason: And that’s really going to define, at least in my view, the two main camps that are going to be contending for this upcoming election.

Ben: So, to the people who say, well, membership growth has, you know, USPSA is the biggest it’s ever been, members have been steadily growing. And this is at the same time that we’ve been making the sport more approachable. Why should we change that, right? The sport’s growing. Isn’t that a good thing?

Mason: Yeah. First ofall, I think it’s important to understand that the organization is a nonprofit, but it’s not a charity. So it’s not just intended to be, “Hey, like let’s get everyone out and get their first exposure shooting a gun.” It’s not intended to be that. They have a lot of programs that are places that are good for that.

Even Steel Challenge is pretty good for that. But USPSA as a shooting, discipline is not intended to be strictly speaking inclusive, it’s intended to be a crucible for competition. So, you know, eight year olds, people that don’t really care that much about competing, the guy with the Ruger Mark Three that I spoke about a minute ago, someone’s wife who might come like once every three years. Those people aren’t necessarily the people we’re really trying super hard to pull into the fold. We’re looking to get people who are really enthusiastic about practical shooting as a discipline and wanting to get better at it and compete.

That’s what our sport is optimized for. Not every person who’s peripherally interested in firearms.

Ben: Right. And, even if we had capacity and all the matches, making the rules unnecessarily broad, allowing basically everything under the sun when those aren’t something that necessarily adds to the competition, right there, there’s a case to be made that even if we have the space in matches, just adding random stuff that doesn’t actually enhance competitiveness, it doesn’t make the guns more interesting to shoot, it just means you don’t have to buy a competition specific holster. If you’re having to cater to people who are that uninterested in competing, I mean, like you say, what are we doing this for?

Mason: Right. And so as a thought experiment, right? Let’s just say that the capacity aspect is removed from the situation. Let’s say that every range in America, all of a sudden is a USPSA club. It’s still not a good thing for there to be 15 different rimfire divisions, a single action revolver division, plus all the divisions we have, plus multi-gun divisions. At the end of the day, it’s a competition.

And when there’s the implication of having a competition is that you’re going to award people for winning and competing and doing well, like that’s the whole point. So when you dilute down the meaning of winning or the meaning of competing, by having, you know, two dozen meaningless divisions or all kinds of contradictory or nonsensical rules, it does degrade what it means to have a competition and an organization that is intended to promote competition.

I know not everyone necessarily shares that view and not everyone necessarily shares the view that we don’t need every individual we could possibly get involved with the sport either. And, I’m sure that would be regarded as a hot take, but, it’s just the way our sport is structured now, in the way it’s optimized, it’s not really optimized for those sorts of people or those sorts of guns or anything like that. Like you mentioned, like Tyler mentioned, barriers to entry that are sensibly placed and, deter people that don’t really care that much are not necessarily a bad thing.

Ben: Yeah. I mean the real question is, where where’s the soul of USPSA? Is it at the club match? Is it at nationals? Obviously it’s a balance somewhere in between, but at the end of the day, anybody can start a local outlaw club match. In fact, I’ve done it around here, and we don’t run USPSA rules because it’s meant to be beginner friendly.

Ben: It’s run what you brung, gun and two mags, just show up and shoot. But that’s it’s a different sport, where USPSA, to some degree it is, like you say, it’s the crucible at which we will test and determine a national champion and determine our team to send to the World Sshoot to represent the United States.

Mason: That’s right in the first page of the mission statement. There’s five items, which I can never fully remember off of hand. It really does at least in passing allude to the fact that USPSA has a place on a club level from people that want to shoot a match once a year, all the way up through the World Shoot, and I won’t bother to attempt to recall what those items are in specific, but you can find them on the first or second page of the rule book.

On the subject of candidates and ideas and stuff, one of the ideas that’s been batted around a lot lately is that Steel Challenge should be bisected from USPSA, or as far as the organizational leadership goes. And I think that’s a really good idea for that exact reason, because at least as one organizing body, it seems like it’s really difficult to manage what’s good for clubs, for people that just want an inclusive atmosphere, with all the benefits that this dude cited. And there’s the guys like you and I that are really serious about competing and want to compete on the highest levels possible. And it seems like it’s a really tall order to manage and make the best possible experience for both of those two different camps of people. So bisecting or segregating, if you will, the organizational leadership of Steel Challenge and USPSA at a minimum would make it so that you could at least have people that really care about both of those things a lot in charge. I know I can speak for myself when I say I wouldn’t want someone who’s strictly a Steel Challenge shooter to be involved with managing what happens at USPSA matches because they’re not going to care and they’re not going to look out for my interest as well as I can myself and vice versa.

I would imagine I’m not going to be particularly apt at managing Steel Challenge because I don’t do that very much and I don’t know what they would want. So there’s one specific idea which really paints into the same broader discussion over whether or not we should be leading those things individually or how we should be managing at a minimum. It seems like for sure it would be a good idea to put people in charge who care the most about this stuff.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely.If you have different purposes, they can be owned by one organization, maybe that’s smart, maybe it isn’t, but certainly having different people overseeing the different departments who care about those. So what’s the case to be made that USPSA would actually be a stronger organization potentially if it were not necessarily smaller, but if it were to grow more slowly with a more dedicated competitor pool, from a headquarters perspective? What’s the upside? Why not just chase participation?

Mason: So I mean the view, it seems, of the prior administration, if that’s what you’re asking is that it’s a thirty or forty thousand member of strong organization. There’s only 4,000 “active” members, meaning people who routinely shoot multiple matches per year.

So the 37,000 or whatever, whatever the number is, the significantly larger majority are the ones footing the bill for pretty much everything. So it is their view that they should be doing everything they can to get more people out to club matches with whatever frequency possible. Most likely, if they throw a bunch of marketing dollars at it, the best they can hope to do is get people to come to maybe one or two more matches per year.

And I don’t really necessarily agree with that, obviously, based on the way I’ve been speaking. It seems that the main benefit of doing that is for financial gain for the organization. And again, if anyone’s seen our financials were not really hard up for cash and ultimately it’s a non-profit.

Ben: So in your view, as long as the Org can cover the cost to put on a high-quality nationals, send out whatever collateral they need to get to members, potentially help out clubs to some degree if possible. But as long as we’re, breaking even, we don’t necessarily need to just be chasing the dollar as long as we’re doing… Like, what are the core jobs that as long as they are done…

Mason: Here’s a not particularly hot take at this poin It’s impossible to complain about or be motivated by money and say, oh, we don’t have money for this. We don’t have money for that. We have those nationals at this range because they’re cheapest. It’s impossible to make any sort of a financial case when you’re giving away $300,000 to three people. So if you really wanted to make anything happen, you could borrow money from somewhere to make it happen. The financials of the organization really are not interesting to me at all. As long as we have the money we need to look after everyone’s interests. And I don’t think USPSA needs to start building ranges for people or reaching down into the grassroots, on that really deep level and propping clubs up and throwing money all over the place.

But if they can host a decent nationals and they can host a decent NROI program, then those seem like two really good places to start to me if you need to spend money somewhere.

Ben: And those are two places from what you’ve seen, that that really are not getting a lot of resources dedicated to them?

Mason: I mean, I don’t want to throw too much shade on specifics because I don’t really want to volunteer specific opinions on what I would do differently. Like we talked about, we want to keep this thing brief, but, yeah, people had multiple, multiple criticisms of the nationals that was hosted earlier this year, as far as the resources that were doled out in the form of bathrooms and food. And straight from Foley’s mouth, he said that they took this place because it was the cheapest. And I don’t really know if that’s necessarily the best reason to do anything. Not that the facility isn’t nice and stuff, and it’s no secret either that NROI has been slipping since the Foley administration started. The RO quality seems to be inverse to the level of the match that you go to these days.

Mason: And I think that’s probably the opinion of most of the “active members” that you would talk to. It’s not good. There’s a lot of things that need to be fixed both with the actual rule book, and there’s a lot of things that need to be fixed with how we service, supply, and discipline match staff, when it comes to ensuring quality. And I don’t really know necessarily know if the latter part of that is even necessarily need to be solved with dollars. Probably not. I feel in a lot of cases, it’s not, here’s the hot take. It’s not necessarily about comprehension of rules on the part of the staff, that’s the issue. So I don’t necessarily know specifically what to do differently, but I don’t necessarily think that it needs money to fix.

Ben: And to some degree, it’s, it’s a matter of having someone in the office who you know…

Mason: …who really cares. Who their number one priority is, as Tyler said, making competitions excellent, ensuring a competitive quality and equity and not just growing participation.

Ben: And when they don’t know the answer reaching out to people, polling, maybe not the membership, but maybe everybody who’s been involved in running a level two match this year. “Hey, what worked? What didn’t?”

Mason: Yep. And so this is again, you know, to, to take a step further. It’s been one of the most common and scathing criticisms of the past administration is they did not solicit feedback from members in any way. One of the first things I would try to amend if I was king for a day is ensuring there’s referendums on things that happen, especially when it comes to changing bylaws, but in particular with the rule changes, because it’s been, if nothing more for the benefit of your USPSA political career, that’s a good idea. Obviously, people are very upset about how many things they change without asking for permission and for the long-term health of the organization, if you’re changing positions and bylaws and the way that you structure the organization that needs to be voted on by referendum, not just by a closed captive audience.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, it kind of seems like a lot, especially with, with some of these rules. I don’t know if you agree with this, but it looks to me like they didn’t ask because they knew the answer wasn’t going to be favorable. So they wanted to just do it anyway.

Mason: Or maybe they didn’t even think about it. In all honesty, that’s really what it seems like to me, like when it comes to like the flashlight thing, I’m sure they thought people would love that. Like, that’s why they did it. You know, like they did it because of the fact they thought it would get more people involved, but they didn’t think about any of the potential adverse consequences. Like in a matter of hours from that rule rolling out, there was good people machining tungsten battery slugs to put on your flashlight, right? It’s like, well, clearly that was not the intention, but that was just, they didn’t think about the unintended consequences at all.

Ben: Well, right. Yeah. I mean, because there were sort of two issues there. One is, is this generally the direction we want to go? And secondarily, if it is, let’s make sure we wrote, we write an airtight rule set that actually defines it.

Mason: Yeah, for sure not to nitpick the specifics of the flashlight thing specifically, but all that could have been fixed by thinking it through a little bit more thoroughly. And/or, having some kind of option for public commentary, which at the time was a part of the bylaws and they just did whatever they wanted anyway.

Ben: Well, like I said, I think this is going to be the, hopefully the first of many discussions. We’re going into this season where apparently at some point in the future, there will be a special election. Nobody really knows when or where…

Mason: Yeah, that information has been pretty hard to get ahold of.

Ben: so hopefully, I’ll get a chance to talk about this again some time and…

Mason: I’m sure we will. Yeah, I’m sure we will. This is good. I mean, the one good thing for all the shit we’ve talked over the last half hour, right? The one good thing is people are more politically engaged right now with the org and they care more than they ever have in the past. And the number one way to make change is to increase political engagement because when people know, at least know what’s going on and care, they’re a lot more likely to hold people accountable to make sure that their leadership is working for them, which is a good thing.

Ben: Yeah. When, when you just get so used to, “Don’t even bother, nobody cares. Nobody’s listening.” People just tune out and, and that’s the way the organization sort of gets into a death spiral.

Mason: Yeah.That was like the way that Foley campaigned for his second term was he’s like, “Oh yeah, people are always surprised when they email me and I respond, and I’m trying to be really responsive.” And then it’s like six months later, he’s blocking people on Facebook for critizing him.

Ben: Ah, good times.

Mason: There’s room for improvement. Things look good, good change is coming, as long as people continue to care and they continue to talk about the stuff they want. I think really good things are coming soon.

Ben: I hope so. And hopefully this contributes to that discussion. So Mason Lane, thanks for your time.

Mason: Well, thank you buddy.

The post #75: Mason Lane on Participation vs Development appeared first on Berry Shooting.

Stage 5

This was an 18-round stage, so I made sure at Make Ready to get a feel for how much force I needed to seat the 23-round mag on a closed slide which I don’t do in matches much. That was helpful.

You had to start in the chair, but it was pretty top-heavy and likely to tip over or get in your way, so I visualized in taking a step off to the side so it was out of the way as I loaded the gun. Some folks chose to shoot from seated but that struck me as risky. It also made transitioning to the left side a regular 180 degree transition.

The headshot on the left was right at the 180, and so I planned a strong cue to shoot it standing still and not try to leave position on it. But I also visualized in that I needed to be aggressive moving to the last position because otherwise it would be a lot of dead time in the middle of the stage. The two came into conflict, and I ended up pulling off the headshot as soon as I saw the dot but before I finished pressing the trigger. That one shot was the largest mistake of the day.

Stage 6

This stage was apparently based on a stage at the VA State match last year (video from Beaker here). On principle, I approve of the the practice of borrowing good stage designs. Not everyone is a great stage designer, and even the best don’t always have 6 good ideas a month. You also always learn something new by setting up good designs from someone else–or even just stealing a section of a stage that has an interesting flow. To my eye, the version of the stage set up at this match was actually much more interesting than the original, with tighter shots and having to work more around the barrels in the middle of the stage. Also the array at the end with the targets at receding distances instead of shoulder to shoulder at close distance was more interesting.

This stage offered two basic options as a consequence of the two start positions. If you start on the left, you have to do a short run forward to be able to shoot all the targets from the box, but then the rest of the movement is left-to-right. If you started on the right start position, it was less overall movement, but all the movement was right-to-left.

As you can see, I chose to just move into position, do the reload moving across, and shoot the right box in two positions. It worked well.

Classifier: Can You Count

All the usual mistakes: didn’t take the classifier seriously because it’s so easy. Was sitting in the shade talking to squadmates while everyone else shot it. When it was time, I was just thinking about grabbing the gun and running the trigger as fast as possible, and rattled off 6 shots instead of the specified 5.

I also have a bad habit of letting the fact that I think a given stage or classifier is stupid give me an excuse for not giving it all my focus. Maybe on my blog I can talk about how this stage is dumb, but in the match, it’s worth points. And the classifier goes on my record, even if it’s low enough to not really matter. Whatever the challenge is in front of you, in order to denigrate it you should first conquer it. And I failed at that here. Biggest mistake of the match.

Stage 2

Another set of targets on the left where it would be very easy to break the 180 leaving. Visualized making sure to finish them before moving on.

The targets on the right were a pretty interesting array. Some folks shot them 1-3-2-4 starting with the ones visible from uprange and then shooting the ones behind the barrels as they could see them. I took the approach to just shoot rolling through, with a short burst of speed for the last target until I had A-zone to shoot at. I think it was a good choice.

Aside from the last two paper targets, all the paper shots were pretty close, but still, I was proud of shooting the whole stage without a Charlie. I made sure to pick a spot on each target, not just shoot near the middle of the cardboard.

Stage 3

Some folks on the squad took the two partials towards the back on the right side as they were moving forward, but I chose to shoot them solidly planted and just rack up Alphas. Various factors just added up to it not being worth it to shoot on the move: being almost 90 degrees off the path I would be moving, being at least 10 yards away, and being partials with about half the A-zone available. If they were closer, or more open, or more along the path of travel, I probably would have tried to roll through on them. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.

Other than that, pretty straightforward stage. 1 Charlie total, which again I was proud of. I definitely was shooting very controlled, perhaps too much so.

Stage 4

Pretty much just one stage plan here since most of the targets were only available from one spot. Four positions. Pretty high shot difficulty, so I took my time and shot extras when something look or felt weird. Everything went pretty well.

During the walkthrough I kept instinctively thinking I would drop the mag when I left the third position, and worked hard to visualize moving out of position, pumping my arm with the gun (to give it something to do instead of reloading), and looking hard at where the next target should be as it comes into view. That worked, which I was happy with. That would have been an awkward place to do an unnecessary reload.

Also, I had been using some Pro Grip throughout the day and wiping my hands at Make Ready as the weather got hotter and sweatier, but it was only kinda working. On this stage I just put on a ridiculous amount of Pro Grip and it definitely helped. You would think after 8 summers shooting in this heat I’d know, but when in doubt, put more on.

Summary

Overall a pretty good match. Movement is trending in the direction I want it to. Points were overall quite good.

Watching the video the gun is still flipping more than I would like, but subjectively at the time it seemed like the dot was coming back quickly and reliably, so I’m not sure how much stock to put in that. More Pro Grip and/or cooler temperatures will probably help.

And of course, the classifier there is just no reason to do poorly at it. Even if it’s a dumb challenge, I shouldn’t let my contempt for it boomerang on me and make me shoot it poorly. Set the ego aside, complain later, and shoot the stage in front of you.

The post True North August 2021 USPSA Wrapup appeared first on Berry Shooting.