Competition Shooting Discussion Group (4)

Paul Erhardt, Erhardt & Associates: "Handgun competition shooters now outnumber shotgun competition shooters...competition shooters are the super-users...hunters may be very avid, but they're not going to shoot a lot during the season...Todd Jarrett, in preparing for the Steel Challenge, will shoot 30,000 rounds of ammunition...to give you an idea of how many rounds USPSA shooters might shoot, based on their most recent classifier scores, the rough but conservative estimate is that in the last 60 days those 20000 classifier scores amount more than a million rounds downrange...16,000 members of USPSA spent approxmately $45 million just on that sport last year... we are a significant driver of sales...GSSF is a huge feeder into USPSA...where we have a problem is that we know this information, but nobody else does because we don't talk to anybody...there's some truth to the idea that we have a hostile press, but as we proved in the Maryland sniper shootings we were able to control what was going on in the media with just three people...Schloastic Clay Target Program got fantastic press...Steel Challenge we've gotten great media, including television like Fox News...the ress doesn't know about us...it's not that they don't like us, it's that they don't know about us...unless we tell them about us, they'll never know about us...the more they know about us, the more likely we'll be able to be on the offensive rather than forever on the defensive..."