New Gun Competition Shows

Two new shows, Hot Shots and 3 Gun Nation, premiered this month on theBlaze TV. When Top Shot came out it was all the buzz on the gun blogs. This time, not so much. This time however, the new shows are NOT soap operas with some shooting thrown in.

When Survivor came out and was a big success, I got interested and watched a couple of episodes. By the description I thought it was going to be something good, where the survival skills of the competitor would win the contest. Man, was I disappointed. It turned out to be all political/mind game horse crap that you see on any soap opera, and the strongest skills are often among the first to be voted out as a threat to the weak. Belch! And Top Shot was made in Survivor’s image.

Not this time. So far. I’ve seen two episodes of Hot Shots and one of 3 Gun Nation, and they are all about shooting competition. What a relief! We got to see, as a side story, a guy fire 18 shots from an auto pistol, with a draw and two reloads, in under five seconds, and hit his target. He used a pure race gun and all race gun gear, but regardless, it is was beautiful to see.

The shows would be better if we were given a little more nuts and bolts of the game, and if we were told a little bit more about the gear (so far no one has even told us what caliber they’re shooting and so we’re left to guess based on magazine dimensions and airborne brass) but if you’re into shooting competition and you despise soap operas half as much as I do (no one gets voted off, for one thing) these are worth seeing. On episodes one and two of Hot Shot, Miculek goes for his 20th straight championship.

I’m just cringing though, hoping against seeing the episode wherein the top shooter is all angst-ridden over his ex girlfriend’s pregnancy with his best friend, and her upcoming surgery, and whether his best friend’s baby with his ex will survive, and whether the dark nemesis with a quaintly unidentifiable European accent will try another takeover of an ambiguously gay shooter’s fashion design business empire, while tempers flair over the Jade’s snooping of Monica’s love affair with Pete.

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6 thoughts on “New Gun Competition Shows

  1. sometimes i watch top shat if i run out of episodes of honey boo boo before i run out of brass to reload.

  2. The current season of Top Shot is all shooting and no politics. They compete as individuals from the beginning. There is also no voting to determine who would go to elimination. A contestant has to come up short at the main challenge, and then at the proving ground, and then again during the elimination challenge. They eliminate themselves in a very real sense.

  3. I liked Survivor. I kind of had the same expectations that you did, but then I found the social aspect fascinating, and enlightening. Watching the interactions of very different people in a social train-wreck wasn’t fun, but it was interesting. In the game, skills and real abilities don’t matter in real life politics nearly so much as charisma, being a good liar, the ability to spread FUD, or actual facts. It’s a 39-day game, with voting ever three days or so, so it’s a highly compressed version of electoral politics, where short term political gain far outweighs long-term survival and reality. It’s an amazing social experiment, the study of which could be of great value. Having people watch the show, consider long-term ideas and all, and making an explicit comparison with modern politics, would turn on a lot of mental light bulbs for people.

    • That is a good point, but I got sick of all that stuff by the time I’d entered the eighth grade. In high school it had reached the level of an absolute outrage. Less than two years out of high school I was self employed and have been ever since, in part to escape that BS, though of course you never escape it. It comes crashing through your own doors, and you learn how wide-spread and pervasive it is.

      By the time Survivor came out, it was; “OoooKaay, more of THIS is it? Well that’s that.”

      It’s called a “reality show”, but it’s anything but reality. It’s a distraction from reality. I did try to point out to my wife how it related to politics and culture, but she would have none of it. To many people, IT IS REALITY, see? It’s “Keepin’ it real”. It’s all that there is and therefore all that matters.

  4. Since I shoot with one of the contestants on 3 Gun Nation, I can promise that it WON’T turn into a soap opera. (Actually, its more he shoots, I try to learn; he teaches, I try to learn; he demonstrates, I try to learn; I shoot, he teaches me more; all accompanied by good natured raucus laughter at my inepitude in comparison. He is a genuinely good guy, and just enjoys shooting with others who enjoy it.)

    3 Gun Nation is about the shooters and the guns they shoot, period.

    Here he is at out last session, just running a gun, something that is very natural to him.

    http://www.youtube.com/results?nfpr=1&search_query=SteelChallenge+Ephrata

    Just for kicks, we tried his competition Benelli M2, to see how close we could get to the theoretical .13 second fastest cycle time of the gun. He get getting one shot off, and jamming, because he can pull the trigger faster than the cycle time. Then he said, “I’ll slow it down to .16 and lets see how it goes. ” So he shot 8 shots for fun. The splits were .18, ,16, .17, .17, .16, .16, .18.

    Bobby Jones described Jack Nicklaus at his best, when he said. “Nicklaus played a game with which I am not familiar.”

    These guys in 3 Gun Nation play a game with which the VAST majority of shooters are very unfamiliar!

    • That sounds more like what I would call a real show. IMHO the goal should be to create more of a how-to documentary, or an on-air class, than what we’ve (sadly) come to think of as entertainment (Championship Wrestling and the Jerry Springer Show). But that’s just one man’s opinion and has nothing to do with the business and economics of air time and all that. I just know what interests this one man.

      When the soap opera crap starts up, I can’t find the “off” switch fast enough. I will actually lunge for the remote.

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