What would you have chosen to do?

My wife, who is office manager for a group of psychiatric practitioners, says she would have liked being one of the paparazzi, snapping photos of the stars!

Fascinating tale!  Competitive shooting interests me.  Don’t think it would quite be my bag but boy howdy, it’s fun to watch!  Seems you’ve  mentioned doing some long range bench shooting too?

Thanks. Never did any long range BR. Most shooting is about as interesting as watching grass grow. Don't believe me? Try to watch a bullseye match. In that sport there is absolutely no action as the shooters try to stay subdued to stay cool, calm, and collected. You'll watch just long enough to know that there isn't anything to see until everyone moves forward to score and you see the tiny groups. But Steel Challenge and Action Pistol actually have something to watch and a spectator can see something happening. If you go to YouTube and do a search for it you'll see what I mean. I think the best videos are done with a hat mounted camera. That's as close to being behind the gun as one can manage.

I describe Action Pistol and Steel Challenge as the most fun one can have out of bed. But there's also a serious side. Soldiers would shoot with us using their duty sidearms before heading out to the sandbox. They told us that it was the closest to the real thing because of the eyes behind watching and the stress of the stopwatch. What new shooters don't realize is that the eyes behind only wish the active shooter nothing but the best. We groan when they get a bad hit and are happy when they do good. It's competition like I've never seen before. We do shoot against each other within the same division, but mostly we shoot against ourselves.

Here's a link that describes the sport to a T. It was a school project. I didn't grade him, but I give him an A anyway. He captures the essence of a match in 6 minutes. It also shows the various divisions seen at a typical match where one shoots on the same squad with production guns, open guns (The Formula 1 handguns of the shooting sports), and PCC (pistol caliber carbine). They all shoot together but each division shoots against only guns in that division. There may be only one PCC in a squad, but with many squads there could be a lot of PCCs in the match. As we decide what squad we want to shoot in, many times PCC shooters (especially PCC shooters) will squad together as we sign up for the match. Anyway, here's the link. You can find better action videos on your own. It deals with Action Pistol but Steel Challenge has the same essence in a different discipline. Lots of the same faces are seen at both disciplines since they build on each other and skills learned in one are transferable to the other. Now these matches can be spectated and it's not like watching grass grow, especially if there's lots of steel to knock over. As hot as it was this past weekend, and it was brutal, we had spectators. They were in the shade, we were in the blazing hot sun.

https://youtu.be/bzZEPkzSc4M

And one of the stages I shot 3 years ago from a hat cam. I'm much faster today. If you get a sales pitch just ignore it, cursor down and click where appropriate.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/luszjgjkfhxqun...5.mp4?dl=0

And with that I'd like the thread to get back on track. I won't discuss competition beyond this post.