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This month’s Q&A theme is competition shooting…
00:50 – Guns I’d like to shoot in BUG match but haven’t
02:39 – Most valuable/expensive historical load out?
03:50 – Guns that were surprisingly good or bad in competition
Ring sight 2-Gun: https://youtu.be/AJKMk6p-iHE
07:03 – Unicorn Brutality gun combo?
08:31 – Match gear failing miserably
10:27 – What do beginners need to do to get into matches?
15:16 – Where do we get our black powder guns?
16:45 – My practice regimen leading up to a major match
18:15 – Thoughts on biathlon and pentathlon
Biathlon history article: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/02/12/military-roots-olympic-biathlon/
22:27 – Mortar competition
24:03 – Using a combination gun for competition
25:30 – Planning stages for USPSA
27:07 – Have BUG matches impacted my thoughts on carry pistols?
29:13 – Will action shooting matches continue to grow in popularity?
30:57 – How do I decide what guns to compete with?
32:18 – Water-cooled belt-fed MGs in competition?
34:52 – Easiest historic gun to shoot left handed?
Great Video Ian!
What are your thoughts on the Cabin Fever Challenge? I think the format for this match is superb.
Thank you for the link to your infromative article on Biathlon.
Actually, prone, a “hit” is equivalent to hittling at least the 8 ring of the International smallbore target. Standing, the target diameter is about 6 inches. The athlete’s heartbeat is in the 160 per minute range during shooting.
Like some commentators, my heart also would wish Biathlon shooting done with full-bore rifles. But fact is that the switch to smallbore made possible to use interactive mechanical targets at 50 m, which immediately show all spectators with the bare eye “hit or miss”. This was the foundation to Biathlon becoming one of the post popular Winter sports events in Europe.
Modern Pentathlon meanwhile is beyond the air pistol level. It has degenerated to using laser pistol “shooting”.
Few readers will know that one competitor at the very first Modern Pentathlon event, held at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was a U.S. Army cavalry officer named George S. Patton. Yes, THE Patton. At four of the five competitions, he was between 3rd (Running) and 7th (Swimming). Alas, he missed the live size silhouette target 3 times out of 20 shots, ranking only 21st in the shooting event. Nevertheless, he was 5th in the overall result. His bad shooting cost him a much better ranking.
There is a story he put two bullets through one hole and this cost him. Always sounded like whinging to me. I am not aware that Patton himself ever claimed this. It sounds more like his suck-up later aadmirers
“(…)1912 Stockholm Olympics(…)”
This is also when oldest participant got gold medal. Namely SWAHN who was 64 years old in Running Deer team shooting. He would also manage to get silver medal at 1920 Olympics Games at age of 72 according to https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-olympic-gold-medallist
As a “Unicorn”, how about a Federov Avtomat in a two-gun match? For period accuracy you’d probably just pair it with a Nagant, but a Bolo Mauser would I think work for the “OG Commie with cool guns” theme.
If you map out the trajectory of Modern Pentathlon and Biathlon as events, you can easily make out the inimical effects of “gamification” and the utter loss of real-world relevance and reality-fidelity.
Modern Pentathlon, as I understand it, was meant to serve as a test of skills for a young cavalry officer/courier. When it was first conceived, they did a reasonable job of working out what skills were needed and what should be tested… Which have now been overcome by events. I’m not even sure what today’s equivalents would be… Rally-car driving? Motocross? Certainly, there’d still be scope for pistol and rifle, but what for edged weapons? Improvised weapon skill-at-arms, with a litter of potential things on the ground to pick from? How would you organize a truly “modern” Pentathlon, these days?
Biathlon is even worse. I’d wager that if you were to present today’s champion biathlon athletes with the course from ye olde dayes, the majority of them would be unable to make the equipment work, let alone finish a course with it.
It’s all well and good, but the problems with this crap all come in from the sad fact that we’ve taken proficiency in the gamed-out versions of all these life-events and equated them to actual real-world skill and potential. Just like with schooling… The whole of academia is a gamified nightmare, with decreasing relevancy and validity in real life.
You have to recognize when this crap is going on, and where it’s gone overboard. If you are in a hiring situation, and you discover that the recent hires you have with really good scores on all the right tests and all the right grades really can’t do the job you hired them for, well… You’ve just hit the implications of gamification on it all.
Fidelity must be retained. If you don’t pay careful attention to it, then the game/simulation scenario you spent so much time developing will effectively become useless for all other purposes besides gaming.
And, the game is not the point for most of these things. Acquiring and developing real-world skills and masteries of those skills is, however…
Brett Stevens had a number of interesting essays about the folly of giving authority to the kind of people whose only aptitude is taking standardized tests. Google the name.
Kirk, Academia is a mess.
Quite a few employers won’t hire grads from prestige universities ( Harvard in particular) unless it is for a Job that requires those social connections.
They prefer grads from Jesuit schools or state level tech schools like Cal Poly SLO.
The Jesuit schools because they know a grad can read at better than a 6th grade level and write a coherent sentence, the tech schools because grads actually understand at least the fundamentals and usually more when it comes to fields like Aerospace engineering.
And again, they can actually write a technical paper that is coherent and to the point…
Harvard has acquired a reputation for having students that are above average, all of them.
Just like Lake Woebegone.
It’s all part of the gamification syndrome, when you get down to it.
It does not matter where you are in society or the culture in general; the results of gamification come into being all around you. Careerism in any professional field is an example; that which is acclaimed as “excellence” almost always mutates into collecting credentials (that are similarly devalued) and “good for the career” job assignments. No attention is paid to actual excellence, and what one often finds is that the vast majority cannot either identify or actually articulate what real excellence in their field might be. It’s all a mass of accreted bullshit that grows like Topsy; go look at the vast majority of “scientific” papers written and published these days. There’s a reason we have a “Replication Crisis” on our hands, and that’s down to the ossification and accretion that’s built up over the decades on all the institutions. Original thought? Anathema. Going against the “conventional wisdom”? The “Agreed-upon narrative”? Blasphemy.
What we’ve got going here, across society and our institutions, is the same state of affairs that existed in the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation: There’s been a buildup of cruft and corruption such that the actual life of the institutions are threatened with destruction by gross reality intruding its ugliness. The pretty-pretty socially ept sorts are facing a crisis of irrelevance, as matters and events overtake their staid and stable assumptions… And, they don’t know what to do about any of it.
One should never worship at the altar of the conventional, the accepted: If you do, you become “that guy”, the one playing the game of IPSC shooting, as opposed to the actual article, a true “gunfighter” that acts within the bounds of reality, not some adopted rulebound sub-section of it.
Korzybski said it thus: “The map is not the territory”, and we’ve yet to fully work out the implications of that insight. Any game is equivalent to “map”, in that it is an incomplete and inadequate substitute for reality. You can plan on a map; you can play a game, but if the map isn’t fully representational of the reality on the ground, you’re screwed. Similarly, if the game lacks full fidelity to reality, you’re training with it is useless.
I recall working with a Major, once upon a time, who believed everything on the map. If the map showed that terrain was navigable, then by God, it was. He would plan accordingly.
What he did not know was that the map had been made during a decades-long dry spell, wherein the certainties of what was and was not navigable for tracked vehicles was different than during a similarly anomalous “wet period”.
Which explains so much about why that exercise went to shit in short order, simply because the Major believed the map over the guys he had sent out to “confirm” the data. All of whom came back and described “morass”, rather than “easily traversed desert upland”.
It’s probably the hardest thing going, that requirement to ensure that your simulations match reality, but there is really no substitute for that. Don’t believe your own bullshit or that of the “stored data” in your records; things change, that being their very nature.
In the late Middle Ages in Europe, the universities were run by the Catholic Church. And they had become extremely good at turning out…Catholic priests.
By the mid-15th Century, a college degree meant that someone could debate with vigor exactly how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. And that was about it.
The needs of an expanding economy were not even being considered. The World was inherently “bad”; only Heaven mattered. Asking for a course in economics (or even accounting) was considered blasphemy.
The only real “advances” were in areas taught by the apprenticeship system. Such as architecture (building cathedrals all over Europe)- and the development of cannon (needed to bring religion to those heathens on the opposite side of the Atlantic- while taking their gold).
The deadlock was broken when colleges were established in the late 16th Century, that were outside of the “Church” system. They taught essentially the old Roman trivium and quadrivium; grammar, rhetoric, and logic (trivium), and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (quadrivium). In later years, to these they added engineering, medicine, and that new science- printing.
It was the combination of those new colleges plus printing (which meant if you could pay and read, you could learn almost anything you needed to know if you had the correct book) that caused the Renaissance to really “take off” in the late 1500s.
It could be argued that the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) was the “last stand of the Church” against this sort of progress. If they could not compel the new colleges (especially those in the Germanies) to “behave”, well, armies were good at “removing” such problems. And of course the Church lost that one.
Yes, the Thirty Years’ War was a war between “tradition” and “modernism”. The Catholicism vs Lutheranism part was just the tip of the iceberg.
Those “ecumenical” colleges were the foundation of our modern universities. It’s not a coincidence that one of the oldest ones here in the U.S. is named “Notre Dame”.
Today, four and a half centuries later, those same colleges are no longer ecumenical. They instead teach a highly-restrictive form of pseudo-religious dogma under the general rubric of “progressive thought”. “Woke” is simply the Jesuitism of that.
(In the New World, the Jesuits burned Inca, Maya, and Aztec records without even bothering to try to translate them first. Sound familiar?)
As with the dogmatic Church universities then, the “post-modern” college system cannot be reformed. The only solution is a completely new and independent system, not bound by their dogmas.
That seems to be what is evolving online, both here and abroad. Heinlein once said that stripped down the basics, a school is nothing but a log with a teacher sitting on one end and a student sitting on the other end. Thanks to the internet, that “log” can now have one end in a retired professor of aeronautical engineering’s den in Akron, Ohio, and the other “end” in a laptop sitting on a student’s lap in Nairobi, Kenya.
Or a dorm room at MIT. Where it’s probably needed even more, these days.
Some things just cannot be “reformed”. As “Doc” Smith once said, “those who have waxed fat upon the old order are greatly in favor of its continuance”. That old order, and its advocates, need to be replaced. Superseded, in other words.
Don’t try to “reform” them. Just avoid them.
Get used to the idea that new institutions are needed. And don’t let the “Old Guard” design the curricula, either.
(NB; the quote comes from Second Stage Lensman. The rest of this mostly came from The Day The Universe Changed by James Burke.)
clear ether
eon
Eon, your ignorance of the Middle Ages is abysmal. Truly absymal. Stick to guns.
Actually, if anyone’s ignorance is on display, it’s yours.
As usual.
cheers
eon
Re: your Major—‘No one can fool a man like he fools himself.’