IDPA Match

Disclaimer: Our club is not connected officially to the IDPA, or anyone else for that matter, but we have IDPA-style matches because they're fun. Today was the first really warm day of the year, with temps in the low 80s and the wind in the same range. I mean you know it's going to be at least distractive when the carpet mats for the prone position station had to be nailed to the ground with 4 inch gutter spikes.

Distractive, yes. We used the round steel popper, conveniently set up in front of a no-shoot. Let me pass on a bit of advice; if you ever find yourself in a shoot-out, and aren't one of the shooters, standing behind one of the active participants is a really bad idea. At least it certainly was today.

We also came up with a more reasonable way to score the unfortunate circumstance of shooting a no-shoot. Instead of the usual 5 or 10 points off, we establish a scale. If you hit the no-shoot in the "A" zones, you lose one point. A "B" zone hit costs you 3, and a "C" zone hit drops your score 5 points. This is based on the probability of the unlucky bystander of filing a lawsuit after the smoke has cleared, which we figure in inversely proportionate to his metabolism at that point.

The final oddity was that I had a malfunction, and was completely flummoxed by it. On shot 3 of the final stage, the slide failed to go all the way foreword into battery. Working the slide simply brought the next round up into the chamber area behind the first one. The correct action would have been to simply tap the slide foreword to fully engage the stubborn round, but folks, this is the first malfunction I have ever had with this gun, and I was at a loss as to what the correct drill was. Like Dillinger said: "Never trust a D.A.s deal or an automatic pistol."