Competitive shooting from start to finish

spent most of last weeks practice taking video, I ended up shooting 2 runs and shot ok. I finally got my holster (bladetech doh) so my runs actually count as real time now which is nice so I can properly compare them to others. I also need alot of practice on the draws, and a pistol belt is next on my to buy list, I knew I needed one but was hoping one would come up for sale used and save myself some money. No such luck and I really hate how the holster moves with my draw.

Reloading I’ve finally worked all the bugs out, just running into a shortage of brass so I’m actually going to go buy 1000 today and load it up. Nice to have ammo on demand and it shoots reliably through my m&p with 3.3 gr tite group and 147gr berrys with OAL of 1.129

Now the story part

After this video was taken, me and 2 other really good shooters (they trade off having the best scores every week) stayed behind and did a whole ton of draws. This was my fault because my draw is 1.6-1.8 seconds and one of there’s (Tim) is consistently 1.1-1.3. I said this gap was because I wasn’t used to the drop and offset of the holster (the mounting put the gun lower and off your body to get a faster draw) and that it would be alot less if we drew without the D/O and from concealment (ie: wearing a jacket). Luckily our holsters can be reconfigured so we got set up, grabbed a timer and started comparing runs.

Now to explain, the 2 guys who stayed around thought it would make no difference but I knew it would because of a few reasons. One was because i had done so much practice with this draw in alberta that to this day I will still move my coat and do my drawing motion even when I’m going for my keys and Tim had not, I’m not sure he had ever drawn from anything other than his D/O setup. The second thing i had going was that without the D/O my belt wouldn’t twist as much (physics, levers, just trust me on this one) so his pistol belt wouldn’t give him as much of an advantage as he had before. A Third point of advantage would have been that I’m skinny and that means its really easy for me to grip my gun even when its right on my belt, BUT Tim is also skinny so its a moot point.

So as we shot and compared time it because clear that I was right. He was still beating me, but it wasn’t by .5 of a second any more. In fact, the only reason he was any faster than me on the draw was that I always have to pause a second on my draw and line up my sights to the target and he is much better at having his sights on target right away (called indexing). As I work on my skills hopefully that will drop and I will get my draws down to 1.1-1.2 consistently

And finally, The video