“You’ll never get ahead of anyone as long as you try to get even with him.” Lou Holtz, Hall of Fame football coach.
An alternate phrasing of this came from a friend of mine who said “you’ll never be truly successful as long as your definition of success revolves around someone’s failure”.
This applies directly to competition shooting as well; it’s part of the mindset of the shooting. The times where I’ve shot truly poor matches that weren’t up to my standards were times that I went to the range to try and beat someone else. When I stopped simply shooting to better myself or to beat my own personal bests and turn it in to trying to beat the opposition, I will invariably end up hurting my own performance. Now, Coach Holtz was talking more about petty jealousy and rivalry, but the same thought process applies to competition shooting. Go out there and shoot to better your own performance – put all thoughts and expectations of performance aside and try to observe your shooting as it happens.
There is a new article up at Shooting Illustrated on getting fit for the shooting sports, whether it’s hunting, competition shooting, or even self-defense. Give it a look, it’s a good article with some excellent advice.
I want to take this opportunity to introduce everyone out there in Gun Nuts land to our newest contributor, Shelley. Shelley comes to us by way of West Coast Armory in Bellevue, Washington where she’s the director of their membership programs as well as coordinating all the events, leagues, and matches at the WCA including their burgeoning IDPA program.
Although you wouldn’t know it from the picture at the left, she’s a reformed skeet shooter, and has recently (as in the last 4 months) taken up IDPA with a serious intent of making Expert by the end of 2011. She’s also interested in 3-gun competition, and I can personally attest is a pretty good shot with an AR15 as well.
One of the areas that Shelley is going to be covering with her first post tomorrow will be why someone that is completely foreign to competition shooting and relatively new to the firearms industry would choose to take up a sport like IDPA. Look for that post tomorrow. She’ll also take a look in the future at some of the common gun-industry myths perpetrated on unsuspecting women shooters that are looking to purchase a defensive firearm. To that end she’s actually carrying and shooting a j-frame revolver as her daily carry gun, and will have a real neat look at that in the upcoming weeks here on Gun Nuts.
I’m personally excited to have Shelley joining us here at Gun Nuts. She brings a fresh perspective and a unique insight to a lot of subjects that many of us take for granted, and I believe that her voice will add a tremendous amount of information, and more importantly fun to Gun Nuts. I’m looking forward to seeing what she’s going to come up with, and I hope you are too!
Whoops. If you’ve been following the Quest for Master Class at Downrange.TV, you know that we’ve been on hiatus during the election. I’m actually filming the next four episodes, so get ready for new content coming up soon! However, that’s not what this is about. Last night, we threw together an impromptu classifier match and instead of running the Ruger SR40 I was cajoled into borrowing my co-author’s Kimber Pro CDP II just to see how I’d do with an alloy-framed Commander sized 1911 in .45 ACP without any of the stuff I’m used to on 1911s like magwells, decent competition sights, etc.
Oops.
Total time for the classifier: 89.15. Time required to make CDP Master: 91.76 seconds or less. Here are my stage breakdowns:
Stage 1 raw time: 26.67, points down – 1. Total time: 27.17
Stage 2 raw time: 21.54, points down – 5. Total time: 24.04
Stage 3 raw time: 32.94, points down – 10. Total time: 37.94
That gives me the aforementioned total match time of 89.15, making this the third fastest classifier I’ve ever shot, and the fastest official classifier I have on record. The question is, why did I do so well with a gun that isn’t well set up for competition? To be frank, a compact .45 ACP with an alloy frame is not exactly a fun gun to shoot for extended round counts (i.e. more than 12) and 1911s aren’t known for being easy to reload in a hurry either. So what happened?
The easy and obvious answer is mindset. I came in to this classifier and I just didn’t care! I figured “what the heck, I’ll shoot this gun, see what I can do with it and I’ll probably suck”. Obviously, I had a pretty good day, and was able to classify Master (giving me two out of five). This goes to prove two points that I’ve addressed here at Gun Nuts many times, the first obviously being how tremendously important mindset is to your shooting. Like Brian Enos has said, when I was shooting this match I just saw what I needed to see and observed my shooting as it happened. I could at points actually see the brass fly out of the gun with my peripheral vision, and I distinctly remember on the 20 yard stage of being able to really call my shots as they were happening.
The second point in all of this is that training works. I’d just taken Insights Training Center’s Intensive Handgun Skills class where I’d spent a majority of the class working on my press-out to the point where I was able to do a 1.1 draw to an a-zone hit at 7 yards. It’s not a ccoincidence that I had one of the best classifiers of my life immediately after spending a lot of time working on one of the most important skills in the IDPA classifier.
The Quest for Master Class continues, as new episodes are coming back next week! The point of the Quest has always been to see if you can pick up any reasonably well made firearm and shoot it to a high IDPA standard, and for at least one night I was able to meet that goal. I’m really excited about the upcoming episodes, as we’re going to give both the Ruger SR40 and the M&P Pro .40 a really good workout!
For those that don’t know, Wilson Combat has started offering their own line of custom ammo in a variety of calibers, including my favorite caliber .40 S&W. However, the load I want to direct your attention to is the Bill Wilson Signature load for .45 ACP, which features a 200 grain lead semi-wadcutter bullet at around 875 FPS from a five-inch 1911. This is the load that Wilson Combat uses to test their pistols with, and I’d be willing to bet that it’s pretty similar to the .45 ACP Major loads that Bill Wilson talks about in his book on the 1911 that he ran during the early days of IPSC. The .45 ACP Signature load is available at Wilson Combat’s website for $280 plus S&H for 500 rounds.
I’m at Norpoint Shooting Centerstarting at noon today on Black Friday passing out ammo from Cheaper than Dirt for shooters at Norpoint! Come by, shoot some and get a free box of ammo. I’ll see you on the range!
Recently, I loaned out my Para LTC 9mm, aka the Gun Blog 9mm to someone who is shall we say a bit more fastidious about cleaning her guns than I am. I noticed on Tuesday night that ejection from the Para was starting to get a little anemic, with the empty cases popping up about a 3 inches over the gun then just falling lazily all over the place. Contrast with my Ruger SR40 which launches its brass into low earth orbit, and it occurred to me that it might be time to clean the Para. Actually, that’s not true. The Para was forcibly cleaned as it was proclaimed by several to be “filthy”, and other words such as “disgusting” and “how could you do this to a 1911” may have been bandied about. After the gun had been cleaned, I went back and checked my records – the Para had over 10,000 rounds of 9mm ammo through it since the last time I cleaned it, and it was still functioning just fine.
That’s the barrel and feedramp area. Pretty fouled up, but you can see that strip on the feedramp where the bullet would contact the ramp and still slide in to the chamber. The rifling was full of carbon fouling from the round count, which indicated it had been a while since I had even bore-snaked the gun. Still, it continued to run despite the abuse it had been taking.
The frame was actually even dirtier than this. I snagged this shot on my iPhone after the dust cover had been wiped out, which prior to cleaning had been the same cruddy brown/black color that the rest of the gun is sporting.
You can also see something interesting in this photo; more accurately it’s what you don’t see that’s interesting. Notice the lack of crud and grime around the housing for the laser. Even with all this junk on the pistol, the laser’s function and beam remained unobstructed and had been functioning just prior to the cleaning of the gun.
Honestly, the inside of the slide didn’t look all that bad to me. Just a nice “used” color from lubricant and fouling that didn’t do anything to damage the function of the gun in any aspect. Apparently, the breech face was just a total mess of fouling and was about the same color as the barrel and feedramp that you saw in the first picture up here. All of that is now all shiny and clean. I mean it’s as shiny as something that’s finished in coyote tan will ever be.
Gunk from the inside of a Para LTC 9mm
And here’s the money shot that you may have seen yesterday at the Shooter’s Log. All that mess on the q-tip is actually crud that came out of my gun from somewhere. I don’t know where, because I didn’t know you could fit that much fouling inside a 1911 and still have it run, but I guess I was wrong.
I should mention that I never intended for my gun to get this dirty. The Para hasn’t been my primary competition gun in a while, but it gets taken out of the safe and run whenever I need either a 1911 or a 9mm to compare with whatever I’m testing/shooting at the time. It would then usually get lubricated and put back up to be called upon only when needed. In the course of all that shooting, it worked up a serious round count without being cleaned.
Don’t do this to your guns. In terms of intellectual exercises, it’s neat to see a 1911 go 10k+ rounds without so much as a boresnake passing through it, and it’s a credit to Para that their alloy 9mm platform stood up to this kind of abuse. Even as “anti-cleaning” as I am about guns, they should probably be cleaned more often than I cleaned this, as that much neglect can actually start to cause mechanical failures and other issues with the pistol. Please clean your guns more frequently than I cleaned this poor Para.
But it is interesting to see how well made modern firearms are. The various torture tests at Pistol-Training.Com (first the M&P, then the HK P30, followed by the HK45) have really demonstrated what our current level of pistol technology is capable of delivering. These are very interesting data points on what firearms are capable of when they’re pushed well past the performance limits of the everyday shooter, and I hope that we continue to see this kind of serious testing as new guns come out.
I’ve been running the Lucid HD7 red dot on my Ruger SR556 for almost a month now – as I step up my rifle shooting I’ve put about 600 rounds through the SR556 with the Lucid mounted on top of the gun. That’s not nearly a high enough round count yet to really establish the reliability of the sight in tough match conditions, especially since matches are on the downswing right now in the PNW thanks to people not wanting to play outside in the rain. However, it is enough time to form an initial impression of the optic, which is pretty positive.
Here’s the actual spec page on the Lucid, and I’ll touch on some of the features briefly. The quick hits are that it’s a 1x red dot optic, with 1/2 MOA click adjustments; the optic features four different sighting reticles which are either a simple dot, a circle crosshair, a true crosshair, and a circle with a dot in it. In practical use, I really only use the dot or the circle/dot combo. The simple dot is nice if you need a bit of precision for your shots, and the circle/dot combo is very nice for shooting IDPA/USPSA targets from 25 yards and in. Another nice note – point of impact didn’t shift for me when I changed reticles.
The optic has two modes of operation for the brightness of the dot, manual and automatic. Turn the optic on and it’s in automatic mode, which actually works pretty well for the most part. Since I’ve only shot the gun indoors, I’ve only really used it in automatic mode, so I can’t speak to the adjustments on how it will perform outside. To switch modes just press the power button once, and it will switch to manual brightness mode, which is controlled with the little up/down buttons on the left side of the scope.
The big selling point for me right now is that it runs on AAA batteries. If I’m not going to hang one of Trijicon’s battery-free products on my gun, then I want something that I can actually find batteries for at a Target or Wal-Mart. Buy groceries, and oh hey, pick up a pack of AAA’s for my optic. The optic also has an automatic 2 hour shut off switch, so you’re not going to leave the optic on and kill your battery on accident. I’m kind of torn on the auto-off feature – while I don’t like running my battery down, if this optic was mounted on a serious fighting rifle or a home defense carbine I am not in love with the idea of having to turn my sight on just as the fight is commencing. When my front door is getting kicked in at 0200 is not really a good time to try and remember where the power button is on my sight. The only other negative feedback I have is that the click adjustments aren’t as positive as I’d like, but that’s picking nits and I recognize that it’s not really a big deal.
My overall initial impression is favorable: I like the sight, I like the price point, and I like that it runs on AAA batteries. For the price point, you could buy five of these for what you’ll pay for an ACOG and outfit several emergency anti-zombie rifles. I think that this optic would go exceptionally well on Ruger 10/22 or an S&W M&P15-22, it’d also probably be a pretty cool optic for a shotgun. I’m going to keep running the optic on the Ruger SR556 for the time being. We’ve got some pretty cool matches coming up and I’m hoping we’ll get to see how the Lucid HD7 does when it’s getting banged around on a 3-gun stage.
I hope that you’re all having an awesome Thanksgiving today, surrounded by friends, family, and firearms. I know that right now in the political spectrum, everyone is wound around an axle about the new Director of the BATFE, or the TSA pat-downs, or whatever else is going on. But just for today, I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to eat turkey, teach my niece and nephews new and interesting swear words, and generally relax. We can get back to kicking ass tomorrow.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there, and today I can say that I’m truly thankful for each and every one of my readers, listeners, and fans out there in the world. You guys are the reason that all of this goes down, and without you I’d just be yelling to myself. Thank you all, and have a happy Thanksgiving.
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
