Rimfire steel pistol match

I had very mixed feelings about the rimfire steel pistol match I was looking forward to in earlier posts.  I went and participated in it yesterday.

A lot of new shooters were there.  I love new shooters.  I am constantly looking for new shooters to mentor.  I teach them proper technique for best accuracy, and then I teach them how to sacrifice technique for speed (to the best of my own limited skills) if it's necessary to do so.

However, in my opinion a timed steel match is not the place to go if you don't know the manual of arms of your gun or don't have the strength to run the bolt on a .22 pistol.

I was particularly irked by the notion that a person can show up with an absolutely filthy gun where the bolt on a Ruger MkIII acts like it's been lubed with a 50/50 mix of peanut butter and elephant snot.  They shoot and get malfunctions.  They can restart the stage for a failure to feed, failure to eject or failure to fire.  You do the math and find out how many times that particular type of gun can manage to get 10 shots off with 0 failures.

Other irksome discoveries were new shooters who didn't know how to turn on their red dot sight on their ninja-ized Ruger MkIII, new shooters who came with 1 magazine and had a 50 round course of fire until their turn was done, and new shooters who need to be told a dozen times inside of 3 minutes to keep their finger off the trigger while loading.

I love new shooters.  But new shooters belong with a coach, in a low pressure environment, where they can learn proper fundamentals and gun handling skills.  Not at novice-to-intermediate events where people are looking to move to another stage of marksmanship.

A lot of what I saw would have people kicked off the range at other events.  Too many muzzle sweeps, too many fingers on triggers.

I left after two stages.  I left because the pace was so accursedly slow and there were too many of the new shooters in line in front of me, and because I was cold and didn't wear appropriate clothing, and because I was moderately worried for my safety.

That being said, I did learn a little bit in my short stint there.  I started to REALLY get a feel for that fine window that comes after recoil but before conscious recovery, where you can settle the front sight on the target and squeeze again, getting 5-6-7 shots off a second.  I experienced just a hint of that feeling, and I think the shot timer over my shoulder helped me to focus on it, along with the steel giving auditory feedback of acceptable accuracy.

I need to run more, but I think I'm going to build my own steel setup for rimfire rather than going back to this rimfire match.  I want to experience more of that link between the front sight and the trigger.  It was enlightening and I think the Buckmark is going to end up being a great tool to explore it in greater detail.