The United States Practical Shooting Association has selected Missoula for two parts of its national shooting championship competition, to be held June 20-24.
“It means we'll probably have 350 to 400 competitors in town, and people will get a chance to see some of the best pistol shooters in the country,” said Gary Marbut, a member of the Big Sky Practical Shooting Club.
Practical shooting is to regular target shooting as Dirty Harry is to Barney Fife. It's the extreme version of shooting. One of the categories of shooting, the open division, even calls its weapons “race guns,” hopped-up, modified guns that are far, far from the stock model.
The competition will be held at the Deer Creek Shooting Center, off Deer Creek Road between East Missoula and Bonner, and will feature two divisions of pistol shooting - the open, “race gun” division and what's called the “limited 10,” which features stock guns with 10-round magazines.
Dave Thomas, president of the USPSA and a former Missoula resident, said a handful of connections led the association to pick Missoula.
“So many of the top people in our organization have been there and spent time on the range, so everybody knows about it,” he said. “We know Missoula is a great community and Deer Creek is an excellent range, so it's an easy choice.”
Practical shooting puts shooters through their paces, enough so that some of the very best competitors do weight and other fitness training to prepare for competitions. The competitors have to move through an obstacle course shooting anywhere from three to 15 targets as quickly as possible. The scoring reflects accuracy, speed and power, and what emerges is a score based on successful shots per second.
The competition is further divided into a classification system that works like a handicap in golf. That means there are grand masters and masters, with a handful of lower categories for what the USPSA's Web site describes as the “regular Joes.” The grand masters, the site notes, are the Tigers of the shooting world.
“You'll see some of the very best pistol shooters in the country that week,” Marbut said.
Wait, check that: “You'll see the best shooters in the world,” said Thomas. “There's nobody better than the top guys, and they'll be there.”
Practical shooting as a competition sport evolved from experiments regarding the use of handguns as self-defense weapons. The researchers were, quite often, members of military or law enforcement looking to challenge the accepted standards for training, technique and equipment. Here's how USPSA's site describes the evolution:
“You may remember in the original Dirty Harry movie, Clint Eastwood's character visits a training center and walks down the street of a mock city engaging hostile targets while identifying and sparing innocents. A lot of us saw it, too, and thought ‘Cool!' It looked like too much fun to be just the law enforcement work of qualifying with a handgun.”
By 1976, a group of international enthusiasts founded what they called the International Practical Shooting Confederation and the sport was on the road to broader recognition.
“For 20 years, USPSA competition has provided a test bed for equipment and techniques, many of which are now the standard for police and military training,” the Web site states. “Some of USPSA's top competitors are regularly employed as trainers for elite police and military units.”
USPSA now has about 400 affiliated clubs across the country, and Marbut and Thomas said competitors at the national competition will come from all over the country, as well as a few from other countries.
“This is the best of the best, so it's something people will enjoy coming out to,” said Thomas.
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