Monday, May 26, 2008

Ian - Dundee - May, 2008

I like to show a lot of match videos after the weekends when I actually manage to attend a match. And because I tend to shoot with the same people, you tend to see the same people represented on the match videos I publish.

This is good for you, because the videos are typically short and to the point. These folks know how to shoot a match and don't generally spend a lot of time trying to find the aim-point which will hit the target. Translation: the videos are short, easy to watch, and don't embarrass anyone.

At this match we started out with 13 people on our squad. Curiously, the squad was whittled down to 7 members before we finished the match.

One regular shooter (Whitefish) discovered that we had more people in the squad than was typical, so he moved over to another squad, leaving 12 shooters.

We had one shooter ("Mike") on his first match who DQ'd on his first stage. Embarrassing as it was personally, he and his friend stuck around for another stage to talk about firearms and other gear which would be appropriate to USPSA competition. We may have both the DQ shooter and his friend back at a future match, and I may talk about how to respond to such questions as "what pistol should I buy, I'm on a limited budget?" later ... but I am encouraged by their interest. We always try to be of help to new shooters who want to play the game, but WHOO! it's not easy to give the best advice without knowing more about the prospective shooter than can be defined when the match is in progress. Eleven shooters left.

At the next stage, another shooter (who was competing in his Second USPSA match) DQ'd due to" breaking the 180". When he finished, he slightly pointed his pistol just a bit too far uprange. Easy to do; learning an instinctive awareness of "the 180" is an acquired skill. Ten shooters left.

Somewhere between the third and the fourth stage, another shooter wandered off. Nine shooters left.

At the end of the fourth stage, Trevor had to leave early because of a prior personal commitment. Eight shooters left.

And on the last (sixth) stage of the day, Evil Bill's Glock ... Blew up! (See below). Seven out of 13 original shooters actually finished the match with the same squad they began with, and we missed them all.

The New Shooter Who Stuck With Us:

At the start, we had one new shooter (DQ), one new shooter who had DQ'd on his first match (Mikey Scribbles, who finished the match safely and earned his certification), one shooter who had certified earlier in the month, but DQ'd today, and a "Broke-Dick Gun" (Evil Bill and the Penguin Gun).

But we had one competitor who entirely stood out from the crowd, and I think he deserves some special attention.

Ian speaks with a pronounced British accent. When I RO'd him on the first stage, he surprised me: the stage required a starting position "facing uprange", and when the buzzer sounded he pivoted on both feet and actually began the draw before having shifted his feet. I was startled and thought he was going to break the 180 on the draw, but he actually managed to move to a downrange-facing stance before the pistol cleared the holster; then he started moving his feet. It was a professional-looking move, and I was convinced that he was a 'ringer', an experienced IPSC competitor who was visiting the USA, and was much more experienced than he seemed to be at first blush.

Later in the match, I introduced myself to him and suggested that "you don't seem to be from around these parts".

Ian politely corrected me, saying that he in fact worked at "timber framing" locally, and in fact lived within a few miles of the range.

I do wish we had found the time to talk more, but the snippets of time available elicited the fact that he was an expat British subject, and had been an ardent IPSC competitor before the British Government passed laws making private ownership of pistols illegal.

He expressed his pique that, while he was serving as an Infantryman, he was obliged to guard British Army Armories, but when off-duty was forbidden to own a firearm for his own personal and home defense.

("Gee, this is just like DC v. Heller!" I remarked. "Yes, it is", he replied.)

Essentially, he put up with the Nanny-statism of Great Britain until just recently, and then he immigrated to America. Here he was allowed to own personal weapons, and so he was today competing in the first IPSC match in eleven years.

We chatted further, but not enough to satisfy my curiosity, and I look forward to seeing him in future matches.

Ian possesses a level of charm which is perhaps innate to the best of the British; I know I'll try not to introduce him to SWMBO. Perhaps more important, after 11 years away from IPSC competition he merged himself right back into the Realm of the Competent, which I have been battering against like a moth to a lantern for 20+ years. We claim to be involved in USPSA competition because we like to shoot, and it's true; but we often show up with some degree of regularity because we like the people we meet in the gravel-strewn pits of American shooting ranges, and I expect that this is one of the people who encourages us to show up month after month after month ...
... because you never know who you're going to meet in The Pits.

Here's a sample of Ian's performance on this, his first IPSC match in 11 years:

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