Bullseye match this weekend

I shot another 2700 this past weekend at Central Jersey. I learned a couple of
things during the match:

- If the safety on your gun happens to move up just enough to prevent the gun fr
om firing, that doesn't count as an alibi. (An alibi is some sort of mechanical failure that prevents you from finishing a stage, or at least prevents you from having adequate time to shoot your timed- or rapid-fire stage.) I lost three s
hots as a result. Oh, well, live and learn.

- I need a lot more work on my trigger control. I have no problem with the trig
ger on my .22, but I continue to shoot low and to the left on the .45. I was ac
tually able to correct this a bit during the match and ended up shooting a bette
r .45 aggregate than my center-fire aggregate. But my score still wasn't what i
t really should be.

The results just came out this morning. I was a bit surprised to see that I won
the .22 slow-fire match for marksmen. I was even more surprised to see that I
came in second for the .45 slow-fire match.

Adding insult to injury

This is what I hate about government-run monopolies. Yesterday morning, new train schedules went into effect. They consolidated three express trains down into two. Trains that were running about 75% full are now running about 110% full. Pretty frigging annoying, 'cause it intensifies that mad rush feeling getting on the train, and because it's going to suck for anyone who doesn't manage to sit.

That would have been bad enough, but I got my monthly ticket in the mail yesterday, and the cost had gone up by close to 25%. Abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous, pardon my French.

Interesting gun statistics

Having mentioned the statistics on per capita gun ownership in this post, I started playing around a bit with the numbers. What I had was a list of per capita gun ownership by state. Add state population to that, and I could figure out how many gun owners there were per state. Add land area to that, and I could figure out the density of gun owners.

These make for some pretty interesting statistics. Sure, Texas leads the country in total number of gun owners at 8.9 million, but California is close behind at 8.5 million, a good 4 million ahead of Florida (4.5 million.) But for density, New Jersey has them all beat, at 144 per square mile, followed by Rhode Island (129), Maryland (124), Connecticut (121), Delaware (116), and Massachusetts (106.) Not really the top of the list for gun-friendly states. Sure, most of the gun-friendly states have lots of wide open space, but it still makes for an interesting perspective on things.

Here's the list of gun owner densities per square mile (of land area -- I wasn't the surface are of a state that was liquid):

  1 New Jersey      144.41
  2 Rhode Island    129.01
  3 Maryland        124.21
  4 Connecticut     121.27
  5 Delaware        115.51
  6 Massachusetts   105.97
  7 Pennsylvania     97.59
  8 Ohio             91.33
  9 Florida          84.22
 10 North Carolina   79.54
 11 New York         74.50
 12 Indiana          70.02
 13 Virginia         69.88
 14 Georgia          68.41
 15 Michigan         67.40
 16 Tennessee        67.06
 17 South Carolina   64.08
 18 California       54.58
 19 Kentucky         51.80
 20 Alabama          47.97
 21 Illinois         46.92
 22 Wisconsin        46.23
 23 Louisiana        45.38
 24 New Hampshire    44.31
 25 West Virginia    41.87
 26 Missouri         36.25
 27 Mississippi      34.80
 28 Texas            33.98
 29 Washington       33.15
 30 Arkansas         30.69
 31 Vermont          28.23
 32 Minnesota        27.58
 33 Iowa             23.04
 34 Oklahoma         23.04
 35 Arizona          18.05
 36 Hawaii           17.54
 37 Maine            17.30
 38 Colorado         16.81
 39 Oregon           15.86
 40 Utah             14.88
 41 Kansas           14.50
 42 Idaho            10.33
 43 Nebraska          9.02
 44 Nevada            8.13
 45 South Dakota      6.06
 46 New Mexico        5.76
 47 North Dakota      4.75
 48 Montana           3.87
 49 Wyoming           3.33
 50 Alaska            0.71

(If I could figure out how to attach a file to this, I'd attach the spreadsheet I was working with. Oh, well, if either of you reading this want it, feel free to ask.)

New Jersey -- a competitive shooting paradise

When gunnies in middle America think of New Jersey, they think it must be the worst possible place to be a gun owner. And for the most part, they're right. Instead of just strolling into a gun store, seeing a handgun you like, and walking out with it twenty minutes later, you fill out some paperwork, take it to the local police department, wait anywhere from six weeks to forever, and then go buy the gun you want. But as far as competitive shooting goes, New Jersey is about as good as it gets.

For Bullseye, there are essentially two matches per month all year round (outdoors April through September and indoors October through March.) In addition to that, there are a number of leagues shooting during the week. In addition to the one I shoot at my club on Wednesday nights, there's another indoor league on Monday night and an outdoor one on Thursday nights. If I could manage to make all of these, that would mean competing 14 times a month, effectively every other day.

But that's just Bullseye. There's a high-power match once a month from March through November, a Garand match every other month from April through October, and high-power silhouette matches every month April through October.

And all of this is just the stuff that I'm currently interested in. Looking at different club calendars, I see cowboy action stuff, practical shooting matches (both USPSA and IDPA), smallbore matches, smallbore silhouette, cowboy lever action silhouette, cowboy rimfire silhouette, etc.

So why does New Jersey have such a strong competitive shooting environment? There are probably a few reasons. The first is population density. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country. Even if per capita gun ownership is lower than the national average, there are still a lot of gun owners in a fairly small area. Some small percentage of gun owners are going to be interested in competing, so the higher the number of gun owners, the more likely you'll have a critical mass of competitors. (I found this graph, based on this data, which shows that gun ownership in New Jersey runs about 12.3%. With a population of some 8.7, that makes about 1 million gun owners. Compare this to Wyoming: they have 59.3% gun ownership, but with about 545,000 residents, that makes for only 325,000 gun owners.) And given the size of New Jersey, the bulk of those gun owners are probably an hour's drive or less from some competition opportunity.

Aside from the density, though, there's the fact that gun owners are a minority in New Jersey, and an embattled minority at that. There's something about being in that position that tends to make people far more involved than they otherwise might be. People in New Jersey are fighting to maintain a culture in which guns are just a normal part of life. They're looking for any way to foster that culture, and competition offers that. Not only are you out shooting, but you get to socialize with other gun owners.

So, inasmuch as it really sucks being a gun owner in New Jersey, there's at least something to offset the suckiness.

Competition

I like competition. Not necessarily the kind of competition where you're competing against other people, although I certainly like competing with other people. No, I'm more interested in competing against myself. Having done something to some level of achievement, I like seeing if I can do myself one better.

This is why I like shooting competitions so much. Even though you're there on the line with 30 other people, you're only shooting against yourself. There's no sense of, "Oh, he's catching up to me, I'd better shoot a 10 on this next shot." Hell, if you can pull a 10 out of your ass like that, why not shoot 10's every time?

But beyond the goal of bettering yourself, there's something else I like about competitions. No matter if I'd had a crappy day, not matter if I'm pissed off at someone for something they did, when I step up to the line it all just drops away. For a while there, there's nothing but a front sight and a trigger. (Or a red dot and a trigger, or a crosshair and a trigger -- you get the idea.) And I usually find myself whistling in the car on the way home, having completely forgotten whatever it was that I was wound up about beforehand.

High-power clinic

This past weekend I attended the high-power clinic they put on at Central Jersey every year. This was a lot of fun and pretty informative.

The clinic was run like a high-power match, except in reverse order and with very loose limits for the timed-fire stages. In a match, the order would be slow-fire standing, rapid-fire sitting, rapid-fire prone, and slow-fire prone. The clinic does these in reverse order so that the shooters can start with the most stable position. Before each stage, one of the volunteer instructors would go over the basics of the stage, including how to set up the sling, how to get into a good position, etc. We'd then get one relay on the line, let them shoot, and then get the second relay on the line to shoot.

I had a lot of fun, although I'd need a lot of practice with the prone and sitting positions to get things right. (The light-rifle league I shot over the winter was shot off-hand, so I have the standing position down pretty well.) I also figured out pretty quickly that I need to work on my sling setup. I bought my M1A last year from one of the members of my club, and I was using the sling as he'd set it up. I think his arms might be a bit shorter than mine. The sling was a bit too tight across the back of my hand in the prone position. Whereas the instructor had said that you should be able to hold that position comfortably for the 20 minutes you have for the slow-fire stage, my hand started hurting a bit after a few minutes, and some of my fingers were asleep by the time I got out of position.

When I started shooting that light-rifle league last fall, my intention was to get ready for shooting high-power. Then I got caught up shooting bullseye and have been focusing on that. Bullseye is certainly a more convenient sport, as you can get in lots of practice indoors over the winter and in bad weather, and you don't have to find some place where you can shoot at 200 yards. It's also a bit cheaper per round (although you end up shooting more rounds.) But there's something about shooting a battle rifle at a target 200 or 300 yards away that you're just not going to get from shooting a pistol at 25 or 50 yards.

Oh, and now I can actually say what the view from Central Jersey is like. :-)

Better bullseye shooting

So I've gotten into this whole bullseye shooting thing, where a full match is called a 2700 (because there's a theoretical maximum 2700 points.) A 2700 is broken up into three 900's. Each 900 consists of 30 rounds fired slow-fire, 30 rounds timed-fire (four seconds per shot, on average), and 30 rounds rapid-fire (two seconds per shot.) The best I'd done so far for a .22 900 was 781. Yesterday, I was at the range and fired a 900 for practice and shot an 822. That's 91.3%, which is an Expert score (85% being the boundary for Sharpshooter and 90% for Expert.) And that included a 98-4x timed-fire target. I have yet to clean a target (i.e., all 10's and X's), but I won't be surprised if I clean one this year.

It had actually been a few weeks since I'd shot .22. I've been working exclusively with the .45, which is currently a borrowed .45 until the one I have on order comes in. My trigger control needs a lot of work on the .45, so that's what I've been working on. I'm getting a bit better, but I do need a lot of work, as my scores have been hovering in the low 80's there.

Guaranteed retirement accounts

Following on from Alan's post, I looked a bit into Guaranteed Retirement Accounts. Probably the best source of information on these is this link from the person who is credited with the idea.

Nothing I read in this description seems to indicate that it would involve nationalizing existing 401k assets, as I've talked about. It mostly seems to be a replacement for the existing 401k program in order to do away with the concept of defined-contribution plans in favor of defined-benefit plans. This is obviously coming from that side of the political spectrum that believes that people shouldn't have any responsibility for their own futures.

The plan (as proposed) is effectively to force everyone to contribute 5% of their income (with half of that supplied by the employer) to a GRA. The GRAs would be administered by the Social Security Administration and would generate a guaranteed 3% over inflation. On retirement, the GRA would become an annuitized income stream. The tax benefits of 401k's would be replaced by a flat $600 tax credit.

What's amusing about the proposal is its political naivete. The link above addresses the question, "Why no simply expand Social Security?", but the answer to that question is, effectively, because Social Security might go bankrupt. "In contrast, the appeal of GRAs is that they are fully pre-funded...." I can't imagine that politicians (or bureaucrats) won't raid these funds in exactly the same way that they raided the Social Security "trust fund".

And while there's nothing explicit in this plan to nationalize existing 401k assets, I wouldn't be surprised to see later action to the effect of, "Gee, these GRAs are working out so well that we think everyone should just convert their existing 401k's into GRAs." But hell, I'm just paranoid that way.

Whole lotta lead

So I was thinking, at a bullseye match, you might have 30 people on the line. Let's say each of them is shooting 185-grain bullets, which is a pretty safe assumption. Not counting alibis, each person will shoot 180 rounds. Add it all up, and that makes for over 140 pounds of lead sent down range over the course of a few hours.

That's a lot of lead.