Practical Shooting Back on Track

Other than the fact my ears are still bleeding from the audio pounding of USPSA major-caliber .38 Super loads, things are back on track, filming-wise. We had an excellent time at the USPSA Area 6 regional championships in Georgia...a tip of the ole gat to Match Director Cindy Noyes and Area 6 Director Charles Bond! We'd elected to go to Georgia because the Area 6s grew out of my old match, the Florida Championships, back in the mid-1980s. We actually shot our matches with flintlocks...joke JOKE!

USPSA can be an exercise in frustration. It is flatly the most visually appealing of the shooting sports, and I'll go out on a limb and say that it produces the finest overall shooters in the world. Contrary to the drivel you usually read in the gun mags, USPSA has divisions that accompdate pretty much any type for handgun you'd want to shoot, Opne Divison is flat-out NASCAR, the province of optically sighted, compensated "raceguns" in exotic calbers derived from the .38 Super; Limited is "raceguns-lite," no optics, no comps, but anything else goes. There's a Production Division, which allows virtually no changes to the gun and practical holsters; a Revolver Division where you have to face the dread Jerry Miculek and a few newer divisions, Limited-10 (which has a 10-round capacity cap in deference to the states who are still actively infringing on shooters' rights) and a new 1911 single stack division, which — since the 1911 is unconditionally the best-selling handgun in America — is already generating huge interest.

On the negative side, the folks who run the organization are generally lost in space...although not quite as lost in space as their "tactical" brethern. Perhaps the Powers-That-Be should look to the South and Area 6 to see how well things can work!