Yeah... I'm a competitive shooter.

I can say this now!

I had my first USPSA/IPSC Compeition today at the Southern Chester County range in Kennet Square, PA and it was a blast!

I arrived around 8:15am and was just in time to help setup a course -- we finished with a bit of extra time for me to gear up and run through the safety check for new shooters. I was shooting my Springfield XD 9mm... we went over the rules of the competition in short and some basic safety information. After that, he had me load up a few rounds in a couple of my magazines for a quick gun handling observation. The above picture shows how my handling went -- not too shabby. He had me do two rounds, two rounds and a reload followed by two more rounds. Finally, a draw and engage the target with two rounds on the weak hand. The Charlie hit was one of the weak hand shots.

Being there to setup, I got to walk the ranges in advance and see what all was going on with the five different courses of fire. However, when I registered, being new, they put me in with 'The Setup Crew,' basically the 'A' Class shooters and 'Master' Class shooters; let me say, it made it very difficult for me to focus on keeping my speed down to focus on my accuracy, heh! While my volunteer photographer (one of the A shooters) had some issues with the first three courses and figuring out how my digital camera worked, he got it down for the fourth and fifth courses.

Here are some videos...

Here's part one of the fourth course of fire -- it's basically two rounds in each of three targets facing uprange to begin with.

The second part of this course was to do the same facing downrange in the surrender position. Notice how I fumble with the L II Retention on my Blackhawk SERPA. Meh.

For the final course, we were, fore the most part, stationary, but it was a really odd course with a lot of obstructions... I almost received a procedural penalty here with my jump on the buzzer -- if the RO had been able to stop me, it would've been 10 points of. Gotta focus more next time.

Here's me doing the course:

And here's how it's SUPPOSED to be done -- notice how his time is more than half of my time.

I apologize for the switching between Blogspot and YouTube videos -- Blogspot is misbehaving.

My First Competition Tomorrow...

So, Saturday at the Southern Chester County range, the last USPSA Competition in my area is being held and I've made arrangements to attend. Should be interesting to say the least -- I've read and watched as much research material as I've been able to over the past couple of weeks. I picked up my fourth magazine yesterday so I don't have to worry about running out of ammo with my shooting. As always, any advice is welcome -- I'm going to try to get there a bit early to help with setup and learn whatever else I can from the folks who'll be there.

Any tips?

USPSA Fun

So, I've been a gun owner, what? All of about three months now -- I've tried to make it out to the range as much as possible and I've watched and read as much as I can about everything from technique to Second Amendment law... even to the point where I'm currently taking a Constitutional Law course (in addition to my 9-5 job and teaching two computer science courses myself).

I've started saving my casings, as I'm looking to start reloading my own cartridges at some point soon and I've found that a nearby range is having their last USPSA shoot on October 20th, which I'll most likely be attending... well, competing.


I've recently changed my grip up to a type used by competition shooters -- it allows for better stabilization during recoil by basically having more skin on the weapon.

From Springer Precision, here's the first video on the grip.

Here is the second video.

In addition, I've also found a series of videos from Todd Jarret on competition shooting on the move, magazine changing and other related topics. That series can be found here.

All in all, I'm looking forward to it, I need to get out to the range at some point soon in order to practice the new grip and drawing/reloading. If anyone has shot in competition before and has any suggestions, let me know -- I think I'll be in the Production division.