Bangity, Bangity (Yes, Equipment Matters)

My local club had a Bullseye 1800 match today. In case you're not familiar with it (I sure as hell wasn't), it starts out with shooting 10 rounds, slow fire (10 minutes to shoot that) at a 50 yard target. This is classic pistol-shooting, one-handed style. There are three rounds of slow fire. Then there are three rounds of timed fire- five shots in twenty seconds, which is repeated and scored, and that is done three times. Then the same thing with rapid fire- five shots in ten seconds, reload, five more shots, score, and do all that three times.

So each match is 90 rounds with a possible score of 900.

I took my little Taurus out to shoot.

It isn't a target gun, by any stretch of the imagination. I shot 516-2X. Not the worst of the match scores, but damn close. Everyone else was shooting semi-autos and all but one had some sort of optical sight.

I wasn't going to shoot the second leg of the match, the centerfire portion. But one of the other shooters offered to let me shoot his Browning Buck Mark .22, with a red dot gizmo.

This isn't it, but it kinda sorta looked like this:

The one I shot had a slightly smaller red-dot sight and custom grips. It seemed to feel all right in my hand.

I accepted. It took me a while to get used to it and some times I had a hard time acquiring the dot. The trigger was a dream; my first shot went way wide as I thought it had more takeup than that. But as the match wore on, I got more familiar and ended up shooting the last rapid fire string at 92-4X for a total score of 728-7X. Which doesn't seem to be too shabby a score for the first time out.

I thanked him for the loan of the gun and muttered how that might end up costing me $500 or better. He just laughed. But still, I'd not seriously consider buying a .22 target pistol until after the ammo drought ends. Some of those can be a little fnicky as to what ammo works them the best and, if the stuff isn't available to try out, what's the point?