Range Report - A Good Match Day

Today was the last USPSA Match for my club this year.

I met Rob at his house on the way to the club, and there was no inattentive driver in a Kia to delay me this time.

I had replaced the Glock 17's 3 pin slide stop with the proper 2 pin version and had tested it yesterday for functioning.

I had recently installed Warren Tactical sights on this Glock. These sights were introduced to me by ToddG and they are quite simply light years ahead of the factory stock sights. They have a much better and faster to acquire sight picture. If you have a Glock or M&P you owe it to yourself to give these a try.

So with a functioning firearm I headed to the match.

Rob decided to shoot the match with his Kahr PM-9. He recently purchased one after really appreciating shooting mine and my recommendation of it as a carry gun. I brought my mags for him to use and together with his own and a few more he had recently ordered he had enough to play with. I loaned him some Fobus single stack mag pouches, which held both the 6 and 7 rounders well and he was ready to go.

Rob certainly won the style points this match for shooting what he carries. He certainly had to reload a lot, but the Kahr stood up well to lots of mag changes and rapid firing that the match demanded. He was able to make most of the longer distance shots even with the short barreled Kahr and with a bit more practice he'll be right up there.

I had a great match myself. Its much nicer when you don't have to constantly worry if your firearm is going to work. Overall decent speed and hits but as always room for improvement.

At the range there were a few interesting failures. The decocker fell off a competitor's CZ and was lost. The CZ did however continue to function without a hiccup the rest of the match.

More dangerously a fellow was shooting his XD when there was a "pop" sound and a puff of smoke. The RO yelled for him to stop. He did so. We then checked (I was keeping score at the time) and the barrel was clear with no squib inside (tested by the expedient of running a pen from muzzle to breech). He wasn't shooting his own reloads but a company's re-manufactured ammo. Thankfully the round had enough energy to clear the pistol and he had stopped in time in any case.

The dark house course of fire was awesome, with good practice in shooting with flashlight in hand.

The match was great, well run, and a ton of fun. I've certainly been bitten by the USPSA bug. Challenging stages, big round counts, shooting and moving, friendly competitors and ROs - what's not to like?

Now I've shot enough classifiers to get classified.

We'll see what it averages out to, but considering my woeful history of malfunctioning firearms at the matches, I expect to hit the bottom with a D class. D class of course because they don't have an E class!

But, this is all to the good so that I have to work my way up and moving up class-wise will be a useful measure of improvement as I continue shooting USPSA and continue practicing in general.