Pin Shooting

I took the weekend off from the world, and kicked back. The club match was a bowling pin shoot.

For those of you who have never heard of such a thing, here’s how we do it in our neck of the woods. 2 tables are set up at about 7 yards from the line of fire. There is probably an official table type defined by the National Pin Shooting Nobbelers, but we use wooden saw horses and wooden doors. The edges of the doors are up near eye level so the 5 bowling pins set near the near edge are easy to see against the backstop.

This is a timed event. Two shooters take the line, and assume a “low ready” position (gun drawn, halfway raised). When the timer goes off, both shooters attempt to clear their table of the pins, and that means the pins must be on the ground, not lying on the table. I don’t know what a pin weighs, but it’s a bunch. The first thing you need to know about pin shooting is “bring enough gun”. A .380 pocket pistol isn’t going to cut it. A 9mm is about as small as will work, and something bigger is definitely a plus.

Murphy looks over this event. If you tap a pin just so, it will fall over, and spin on the table, coming to rest with the rounded top pointing right at you. Hit this, and it will spin some more, coming to rest….. get the picture?

The second thing you need to know is where your gun shoots. I saw more than one person nicking one side of the pins or the other, over and over, and not even knocking them down. For a real treat, imaging 5 carefully placed shots, each one entering the edge of the door, exactly beneath the pin, until the far edge of the door is completely shot out.

On that note, I will mention that I had brought some ammo for my .357 that I had loaded a bit light. Now a .357 will happily take .38 special, and that can be loaded to various levels, depending on your application or inclination, from “cowboy action” at the light end, to +P on the high end. Normally I load .38 brass, which is easy to find, to +P, which I think gives me the most bang for the buck. I wanted to get rid of the lightly loaded stuff, as I had made it in error, and frankly that stuff would have drawn snickers from the cowboys. NOTE 2: do not use cowboy action ammo on bowling pins. They will laugh at you. Fall over, yes, fly off the table, not so much.

Bowling pins are tough. If everybody would use a 9mm or .38 special, you could shoot the same pins all day. A .45 will damage the pins if you use hard ball ammo. A .44 magnum will cause shattered pieces of plastic to fly off the pin as it flies 2 yards back off the table. A .45 with soft lead wadcutters will bounce off the pin, fly back 7 yards, and bounce harmlessly off your sneakers. In its defense, it will knock the pin over.

Oh yeah, how did I do? Well, I’m plenty accurate, but I need to work on the speed. Individually, I finished lower than usual. More practice is indicated. I’ll be picking up more bullets, primers, and powder at the gun show this weekend.