You aren’t going to see this very often

Yesterday I shot a USPSA match at Renton Fish and Game Club. In Limited Division I won the classifier stage (the stage was CM 03-09 On The Move). It wasn’t that great of shooting even though I beat both a Master and Grandmaster also shooting in Limited. I only got a 50.1% classification percentage. This is in the middle of class C.

What is really strange is that out of 13 shooters I had the slowest time (13.66 seconds), but I had the best hit factor. Because I tend to be more accurate than most shooters it’s common that I will get a better hit factor than some of the faster shooters. But I can’t recall ever seeing the slowest shooter doing even mediocre on a stage let alone winning the stage.

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5 thoughts on “You aren’t going to see this very often

    • I can’t say for certain about your ex, I would have to look at my notes. What is her name again?

      😉

      In USPSA slow is not “good”. It’s always trade off between speed, accuracy, and “power” (bullet weight and velocity). On this particular day on this one stage I made the best tradeoffs. Almost everyone else gave up too much accuracy for speed and faired worse than I did.

  1. Ah, yes, the old IPSC (USPSA to Americans) adage:
    You can’t miss fast enough to win.

  2. That is surprising, but not terribly so.

    While I’ve practiced a fair bit of speed shooting, and can teach it at the basic level, my main form of “serious shooting” has been hunting. In deer hunting you rarely get more than one shot (I never have) unless your first shot was a good one, any second shot being a finishing shot. In bird hunting you may get two or three shots, but if you miss your first one, the next two likely won’t help either.

    In self defense the dynamic and the goal are totally different. A peripheral hit with a mouse gun, or no shot fired at all but the mere presence of an armed defender, is sometimes enough to initiate a “break in contact”, and that would be, practically speaking, successful defense.

    In race-gun competition, perhaps it would make sense to place a heavy scoring weight on the timing of the first hit, with subsequent hits having less value, depending on the stage.

    There’s no simple way to do this.

    That military vet who (“for some reason” as he put it) flipped from fleeing, to charging the perp in the recent Synagogue shooting didn’t even have a gun, or any weapon, yet he successfully forced a break in contact, no doubt saving many lives. They don’t have IPSC stages for that, for how could you?

    • It would be interesting trying to score the stage.

      For the uninitiated, IPSC uses points per second as the scoring metric, taking the total points scored by shots on target , then subtracting penalties, and dividing by the time from start signal to last shot. This is called “hit factor”, and highest score wins and gets all the points.

      No shots on target = zero points, but no shots fired = zero time, so we have a divide by zero issue. To make it even more fun, any number divided by itself = 1. The range lawyer arguments over THAT would be EPIC. 🙂

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