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»SOME OF YOU MIGHT FIND IT ODD that I’m writing about the Sportsman’s Team Challenge here in my column. It’s a family-oriented competitive shooting event in Grand Island, Nebraska, a shoot that

featured nary a “tactical” or “defensive” element. It was pure target shooting, plain and simple. No skull-printed neoprene facemasks, no ominously named breaching shotguns or brawny men with sleeves of tattoos

and giant beards discussing the finer points of eye-socketing a hostage taker. I’d even missed Hornady’s “Zombie Apocalypse” shoot by a full week.

QUALITY TIME

It was moms and dads and kids and aunts and uncles and grandparents and couples enjoying the shooting sports in a beautiful outdoor setting. What in the world does that have to do with the USCCA in general or concealed carry in particular?

Well, just about everything.What I saw at the Sportsman's Team Challenge was a shoot-

ing event for the entire family. Though the thought of that might be corny to some, allow me to explain.

When I was a boy, the local shooting club (which was, of course, considered a “rod and gun club”) was dominated by �an-nel, corduroy and twill. Borderline-elderly gents who worked at the local university or in local businesses would shoot clays on weekends and evenings and the area Boy Scout Troops would earn their shooting sports merit badges there.

In the ’50s and ’60s, the club saw many families — my father’s included — shooting together, but the core membership didn’t change much except for when members passed away. As the ’70s became the ’80s and the ’90s became the new millennium, membership stayed pretty much stagnant with the exception of my brother and me who joined in the late 1990s. We attended the meetings and we loved to shoot there, but we would be the youngest attendees and shooters by several decades every time we showed our faces.

That “rod and gun club” is now a Lexus dealership.

PRESERVATION, PASSING IT ONThe �rst group to register, “Team Wildcat,” arrived at just

about 8:30 Thursday morning. They were an a�able group of men from the Midwestern South and joked freely with registra-tion sta�. The second team to register was a family: a mother, father, two children and an aunt. After them was a boyfriend

and girlfriend team, and every other permutation of folks you can imagine was also in attendance.

Giants of the shooting industry began to arrive among the contestants. At one point, Jerry Miculek walked past on his way to help set up one of the courses, and, in case you were won-dering, yes, that Jerry Miculek. You’d probably recognize him; he’s the really nice fella you’ve seen on The History Channel and YouTube emptying a revolver faster than you could dump the rounds out onto the ground. His presence alone was worth com-ing to see; as one retiree with whom I spoke said, “When I heard he was going to be here, I thought it was kind of like when they tow the space shuttle through a town: Why wouldn’t you go?”

Doug Koenig appeared to be everywhere all of the time. This was because he’d recently picked up and run with what the NSSF had started years before; he was o�ered the oppor-tunity to adopt the competition as his own in January 2016 and hasn’t looked back since.

“It’s really one of my favorite matches of the year,” Koe-nig stated. “It’s so much more relaxing than any of the other matches I shoot.”

So again I ask you: What does any of this have to do with de-fensive handgunning, concealed carry or the USCCA?

Many of you are as passionate about the shooting sports as you are about anything else in your life, but you’ve been hard pressed to �nd a way to introduce your loved ones to it. Perhaps the local matches are too gru� and tactical. Perhaps the local range you frequent is adequate for your shooting needs, but there’s never anyone else there with whom you can commis-erate about equipment, technique and shooting culture. If you �nd yourself in this boat, one of the regional matches just might be what you’re looking for.

OUR SPORT, OUR SAFETY

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Shooting events, such as the STC, are an essential element of the armed lifestyle: the family-friendly, all-ages, non-all-black-and-coyote, non-tactical shooting weekend. Al-most everyone knows someone — a fami-ly member, a friend, maybe even a spouse — who would be very interested in partici-pating in the shooting sports but never felt welcomed. If you’re anything like me (male, large and with a background in military and/or law enforcement), it can be easy to forget that not everyone’s idea of a dream week-end is a few hours on a range where he or she is allowed to �re from behind the wheel of his or her personal vehicle.

What that person will require is a way to spend time in an environment in which practice, improvement and camaraderie is stressed over winning at any cost (or neck tat-toos that read to that e�ect). If it sounds like I’ve come down hard on the hyper-tactical community in this piece, it’s because I have. Few things can turn o� new shooters faster than a man in a shemagh �ring a short-bar-reled, suppressed carbine into a mannequin head �lled with red Jell-O and reminding everyone on the �ring line that they need to mentally picture every single shot ending a human life if they’re ever going to get any-where in defensive shooting.

How do you suppose that sounds to someone who’s never even touched a �re-arm before?

SCHOOL’S INIf even what I’ve just listed above isn’t

enough to help you realize what such an event has to do with concealed carry — if you still demand more proof that such an

event would be bene�cial to the responsi-bly armed American — then I present to you the biggest lessons I saw being taught as the weekend progressed.

1. WHAT YOU DID IN THE PAST ISN’TAS IMPORTANT AS WHAT YOU’REDOING NOW

I saw disquali�cations from the compe-tition for everything from dropping guns to negligent discharges to minor rule viola-tions. The competitors spanned the experi-ential gamut from rank amateurs to actual Olympians, and errors did not discriminate. Just as anyone can have a good day, any-one can have a bad day. Who you’ve been is only going to have so much im-pact on what you’re about to do if you don’t bring your A-game, which leads us to…

2. DO IT AS FAST ASYOU ACTUALLY CAN

One of the most dan-gerous disconnects that any trainer sees is the idea of doing something “as fast as you can.” In a perfect world, that means that you accomplish a task as quickly as possi-ble; you do it as quickly as you can. In the real world, the math is a lot more di�cult. To do something “as fast as you can” means �nding and riding the �ne line between being able to maybe do it faster and trying to do it so quickly that

you foul it up. In reference to the DQs I list-ed above, let’s all bear in mind that none of those happened because the competitor was drunk or inexperienced or confused or scared or anything other than trying to do whatever it was as fast as he or she could. I know that self-identi�ed “hardcore competitors” will sco� at the idea, but you need to handle a �re-arm as quickly and as e�ciently as you can — not so quickly that you start making mistakes.

3. THERE’S COMPETITION ANDTHERE’S LIFESAVING

Many of the competitors were shooting what are called “raceguns,” or �rearms that

have been modi�ed to op-erate as quickly as possible. Among other things, the triggers are lightened to the lightest allowed pull weight, the rails are hand-�tted to the slides and the magazine wells have been modi�ed to expedite reloads as much as possible.

And they at least ap-peared to malfunction all the time.

When you start monkey-ing around with a sidearm, you’re taking it outside of the parameters that the de-signer set for its operation. I saw .22 pistols that should

have been ultimately reliable jam up because they’d been “optimized” for competition. I saw 1911-pattern pistols chambered in .38 Super that would have been a lawman’s dream had the tolerances not been reduced to almost zero. Just as some auto racers say, “If you never crash, you aren’t going fast enough,” it would appear that some competitors think, “If you don’t ‘optimize’ a gun to the point of fail-ure, you’re not trying hard enough.” Do what you will to your competition gun, but when it comes to your crisis mitigation supplies, err on the side of leaving it the heck alone.

WEEKEND PLANSIf you are not already involved in the

shooting sports or if you would like to in-volve your family, friends and others to a greater extent than they already are, I would urge you to visit the Sportsman’s Team Challenge website at stcnationals.com and learn more about how and where you can get involved. I cannot think of a better way for a family to spend a weekend.

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“DO WHAT YOUWILL TO YOUR COMPETITION

GUN, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR CRISIS MITIGATION

SUPPLIES, ERR ON THE SIDE OF LEAVING IT THE

HECK ALONE.

”

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