For many years I’ve been fighting a losing battle (daughter Jaime claims I lost the battle years ago) about people calling a “magazine” a “clip”. I’m not fighting the battle alone though. Guy Sagi posted Top Media-Abused Gun Terms and points out the problem is larger than I usually view it:

Clip—Any ammunition-retention system, including magazines, speed loaders, belts, bandoleers and TSA screeners.

I was expecting the worst when I went to Whidbey Island for the monthly steel match. I have been very busy recently and hadn’t shot a pistol in nearly a month. After I arrived I realized I had left my race holster at home. My centerfire shooting was all from an inside the waistband holster and my draw time showed this.

I was surprised to do as well as I did. I did quite well (I won) with iron sighted rimfire pistol and decent (second place) with iron sighted centerfire pistol:

RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics

RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights

PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights

This was a “USPSA like” match I shot in last Sunday. The shooting part was by USPSA rules but the stage designs were NOT! Stages had from 40 to 60 rounds. This was the 60 round stage:

Here is a 59 round stage:

I didn’t do all that well at this match. I made a fair number of mistakes. I overlooked one target. I failed to shoot another target twice, and I had far too many misses on the all steel stage. I also started one stage, stage 5 which I don’t have video of, with a magazine that was only about half full.

It was fun though. There weren’t any no-shoots. There wasn’t any hard cover. There weren’t any disappearing targets. There was just a lot of trigger pulling, reloading and of course fun.

Overall I placed 44th out of 83. In Limited Division I was 25th out 41. Other results things such as individual stage results can be found here.

My shooter point of view video:

Loke was in my squad and has his own video and commentary on the match. His video, and of course his shooting (he came in second overall) is far better than mine:

Ry and I were at the Boomershoot site in Idaho this weekend when Sebastian sent me an email asking about steel penetration by bullets. I was pretty sure I gave him off the cuff correct answers but I was in a good position to do some of the tests. The next morning Ry and I found a piece of 0.5” mild rod and I shot it a few times.

The question was, “Could a pistol bullet severely damage the mild steel rod? Or is severe damage proof that AP rifle rounds were used?” I said, “I don’t think 1000 FPS pistol bullets will do that.” But I also said that a rifle, even relatively low powered lead core rounds, would go right through. Ry said, “The pistol bullets will only polish the metal.”

Here is the photographic evidence:

Entrance of a .223 52 grain JHP from 30 feet.

Side view of the .223 shot.

Left to right are Winchester Ranger 180 grain .40 S&W, hand loaded 180 grain polymer coated lead, .223 exit.

The Winchester Rangers were probably going about 1015 fps and polished the metal a little better than the handloads going about 950 fps. I don’t have any chronograph data of my own for the .223 rounds out of my gun but Black Hills says to expect about 3250 fps.

This shows why those who wish to ban ammo that penetrates police soft body armor are actually proposing to ban all hunting ammo.

Saturday I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. I had specially practiced for this match last Thursday and had high hopes of doing well.

Here are the results:

I won in both rimfire iron sighted (RF-I) and centerfire iron sighted (CF-I). In a similar match last month I had times of 69.39 seconds and 82.6 seconds compared to this months 67.22 and 82.13 seconds. Those differences are essentially in the noise unless the stages were more difficult this month but comparison of other shooters between the months doesn’t show a clear pattern so I’m going with I didn’t shoot measurably better this month. I had a lot of misses so I think I probably was doing the transitions quickly enough to make up for the misses. If I can combine the speed up in transitions with accuracy then I might see some improvement.

Here are pictures of the stages. You can play a game of “Where’s the tennis ball?” in each of the pictures to discover the starting aiming point for people shooting rimfire guns.

I used my video glasses to record most of the stages. Again I forgot to turn on the glasses for one of the stages.

I was very pleased with one string (starting at 0.00:24). I shot five targets in 1.94 seconds. The first shot took about 0.77 seconds so the remaining four had an average split time of less than 0.30 seconds.

It was hazy from all the smoke but I had a nice ferry ride on my way home:

I reserved the training bay at the local indoor range last night and put about 600 rounds of .22 down range:

I had noticed something when I watched Master and Grandmaster class shooters. When they transition between targets they move the gun much faster than I do. Why don’t I do that?

I set up the simulated steel challenge stage with paper targets with the largest possible angle I could get in the range and still keep the bullets in the berm from 30 feet away:

The stop “plate” is the center target so I could test shooting left to right and right to left. And a secondary test was an order of shooting question I had wondered about for years (1, 2, 4, 5, 3 versus 1, 2, 5, 4, 3).

First I shot as I normally do and found the order of shooting didn’t make any difference. And although it was more comfortable for me to shoot left to right it didn’t make a measurable difference in my time. It was always between about 4.6 and 4.9 seconds.

I tried swinging the gun faster between targets. Maximum acceleration then stopping on target long enough to fire an aimed shot then maximum acceleration to the next target. I found it took me quite a bit longer to get the gun settled on the target compared to the way I usually do it. The end result was that I ended up with essentially the same times.

But I kept trying. At about 300 rounds my time just dropped by a full second. It wasn’t gradual. It was just the same as usual on one string of fire and the next was a full second faster. It continued to be in the 3.6 second range and when I sometimes messed up with a target acquisition and it took something like 4.5 seconds it seemed like forever. 4.5 seconds a few minutes earlier would have been a good run.

I pushed a little harder and even had a few runs that were in the 2.8 to 2.9 range. That’s almost two seconds off my previous times. That a reduction of about 40 percent! I backed off some so that I was consistent and was steady at about 3.6 seconds per string. I continued shooting until I ran out of time trying to condition my brain and muscles to make this a comfortable habit.

My gun got so hot I couldn’t hold onto the barrel and I found out when I cleaned it tonight the front sight had come loose. The heat had probably degraded Loctite on the threads.

The gun also got quite dirty on the outside as well as the inside:

I’ll find out at the steel match tomorrow if the training stuck. If it did and I can shoot as fast and accurately tomorrow as I could last night I will be very pleased.

I participated in a USPSA match at Marysville (Washington) today. For some reason I was extremely nervous for the first stage. My stomach was tied in knots and my shooting suffered. The second stage I shot (Killer B’s) I felt better but I still shot extremely poor. I had three misses and hit a no shoot target. It was a tough stage and two people zeroed it. But I shouldn’t have had problem with it. After that I settled down and did okay. But only in one stage (Dirty Mike) was I rather pleased with my results. But that wasn’t the stage that I did the best in compared to everyone else. I did the best in the classifier where I came in 3rd out of 17 in Limited and 7th out of 43 overall. Seven people zeroed that stage.

In Limited I came in 7^th out of 17:

I tested out video glasses I got from Amazon and have shooter point of view for all but one of the stages:

The configuration program for the glasses didn’t work so I couldn’t set the date and time on the glasses and I couldn’t turn off the time stamp. So all the video has the wrong time.

I forgot to turn the camera on for the stage that I messed up on the most. That is the stage I would have most liked to have the video for!

Update: The match winner has his own blog post and video.

I attended a steel match in Renton today. I was feeling kind of weird. I hadn’t gotten much sleep then I was really rushed trying to clean two guns and then get to the match on time. I left nearly 30 minutes later than I planned and I think there was far more adrenalin in my system that I can tolerate without side effects. I was shaking most of the morning, my stomach was upset, and I was feeling strange in the head.

My shooting felt pretty good anyway and I was pretty sure I was doing well compared to everyone in my squad. I was shooting in both rimfire iron sighted pistol and centerfire iron sighted pistol.

The stages looked like this:

Smoke and Hope

Closed Quarters

Roundabout

Double Tap

With Double Tap there was another USPSA target to the far left my camera couldn’t capture from the shooting box. The two USPSA targets were to be shot twice then the center target was the stop plate.

For those unfamiliar with scoring steel matches of this type you shoot the stage five times. Your score is the sum of your four best times. Hence you can determine the average time for a shooter to fire the five shoots on a given stage by dividing their stage time by four. If, for example, someone (like me when I shot rimfire) has a score of 10.14 for Closed Quarters it means I got five hits, on the average, in 2.535 seconds. Considering that it probably took about a second to get the first hit going from the orange marker on the ground to the first plate the other four hits took about 0.384 seconds each. I’m constantly amazed this is even possible let along that I can do this.

My standing in the match was somewhat surprising to me:

I’ve been wanting to get my classification stages completed so I could get a better sense of where I stand compared to shooters nationwide. But I keep getting repeats of stages I have already shot. This match was no exception. We had Smoke and Hope and Roundabout as the only two classification stages. At least I improved my centerfire times from my previous 18.76 seconds to 15.44 seconds on Smoke and Hope. But my time on Roundabout went from 18.67 seconds to 19.43 seconds.

With my rimfire pistol I came in 7^th overall which is ahead of all the other pistol shooters, including open class pistol shooters. With my centerfire pistol I came in 23^rd overall and 3rd among centerfire shooters.

I’m okay with that.

As I said on Sunday I shot in three-gun match as well as the pistol match. I then said:

I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd.

I was partially wrong:

I had based my estimate on my time. I knew my hits (points) were good but I didn’t know they were that much better than everyone else.

I was a little annoyed that even though I had iron sights on everything I was put in open division simply because my shotgun had detachable magazines. Other people with scopes on their rifles were not in “Open”. I got the last laugh on that though. Adam had his rifle scope fail. It literally broke with internal components displaced and visible through the ocular lens. He was left with attempting to look under the scope along the barrel as best he could, seeing where his hits were, adjusting, and shooting again. He shot fast but had poor hits.

I shot a match at the Lewiston Pistol Club today for the first time in years. In my squad I shot far better than anyone else but that didn’t hold true when extended to the other two squads. I did place first in the Senior category and I came in 4th out of 22 overall:

I probably didn’t get high enough Hit Factor on the Classifier stage to push me back up into the solid B class but since I started shooting with this club back in the mid ‘90s I considered it a win for me if I came in ahead of Don Wood. I accomplished that goal today so I’m pleased.

There was also a three-gun match after the USPSA pistol match. I shot it in as well. I haven’t seen the results from that yet but I expect I came in the top three or so. Maybe 2^nd. Some of the other really good shooters had equipment problems. I had one failure to feed with my shotgun but other than that everything ran really well.

It was really nice to visit with people I hadn’t seen in years and catch up on things with everyone.

I should have taken pictures. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe because it was hot. I know that part of the time I was not feeling well. Drinking another half liter of water seemed to fix that problem so after that I drank a liter or so at each stage of the match. Did I say it was really hot?