Bangity -- AAR

I shot an ICORE match yesterday. It was a lot of moving and shooting. There was quite abit of steel, including two aforementioned Texas Stars.

There was one other woman in my squad. We were both shooting Model 66s, fed by speedloaders. Everyone else was shooting some flavor of racegun that was both cut for moonclips and equiped with reflex sights. I was pretty accurate, but with my aged knees, I was slow in moving about.

In those type of matches, your base score is the time that it takes to finish the match. Then time is added depending on where you ht the target: Zero seconds for a hit in the A zone, {lus one second for the B zone, plus two seconds for anywhere else, plus five seconds for a miss. Fast misses are not good, so are slow hits. A few targets may have black centers, those are scored at minus one second. There was one with a plate rack that could be shot at about twenty yards or forty yards; hits on a plate at forty yards were scored at minus five seconds. Quite a few shooters got fixated on trying to make those distant hits and wasted more time and ammo trying to do that.

Steel plates are far more mental than paper. You bang two shots at paper and generally accept what you have. But the plates have to be knocked down and it was apparent when the plates got into a shooter's head and they were basically just throwing lead. The plate rack targets were where one was most apt to hear lots of bad language. Those stages were one where having lots of ammo was a good idea. On one, I had eight speedloaders (not counting the one that I used to charge the gun at the "make ready" command) and I went through seven of them.

Most of the mooncliped guns were shooting either 9mm or .38 Shorts. I guess if you're in the upper reaches of the sport, the time difference in loading shorter cartridges is not insubstantial, when the place in a match can be determined by a few hundredths of a second. The other advantage of a moonclipped racegun is that the empties are kept in once place, as those who are really active in such matches reload. Those shooting non-moonclipped guns have to chase brass if they're reloading.

Maybe it's not entirely kosher in the realm of combat matches, but when I found myself trying to hit a steel plate at a considerable distance, I mentally slipped into Bullseye mode and fired single action.

I had a lot of fun. It was a good day.