Ben3

Bylaws are pretty clear. Terms start January 1st for regular elections. Article 6.1.iii for President and 6.2.iii for Area Directors. For special elections (electing someone to fill a prematurely vacated seat), the Board votes on when the winner will start (6.6, last paragraph). But for regular elections there's no such language.

This. People point to Limited and Production as showing people don't want to shoot irons anymore, but each has its own annoyance. Either having to put 5 pouches on your belt, or having to source and shoot .40. Would a 9mm irons division that only required three pouches on your belt like CO be more appealing? It couldn't possibly hurt.

Agreed. It was a group of guys that agreed to all play by certain handicaps because the benefit was you knew whoever won did it by being the best shooter, not having the best gear. There was/is a humility required to shoot with less than the best money can buy. I'm not sure why that went away, but it has.

Agreed with this. (As an aside, I don't agree with idea that Production was meant to be the beginners division. It was meant to be a place that you could shoot a stock gun if you chose not to modify it. Especially today, I think it's pretty common that the average gun owner has done something to their double stack 9mm gun that would render it ineligible for Production.) I'm not focused specifically on how the new shooter/member will shoot their first few matches, but just the arc they will take if they decide to start practicing and get heavily into the sport. I would like them to have a valid choice between a 15 round limited-modification division and a 140mm anything-goes division. I agree that right now, people will go where the competition is. But that's not a reason to not try to create competition in other viable niches.

This is something I've really been wondering about. People point to Production and Limited declining as a sign that irons are on the way out, but both have significant handicaps, either capacity or having to shoot .40 which is unpalatable to most new members. It's easy to think that what we see at matches is "normal" but inevitably it's a side effect of the rules. Nobody outside our sport uses a BOSS/Taylor Freelance/Henning style holster hanger. They either have the holster mounted directly to the belt, or use a leg strap style dropped holster. But within the sport, those types of dropped and offset hangers are very common, because of the particularities of our rules. Not saying that's a good or bad rule, just that it's ubiquitous to us and non-existent outside of matches. According to Jake's numbers, 8k new members joined in 2022. How many of them had a double stack, iron sighted 9mm that they might have been happy to compete with until they saw that everyone was shooting CO and they had to buy one of those or be irrelevant? People say that the members who already have CO guns are unlikely to take the dots and mag extensions off and shoot Production with them. Perhaps. But new people join all the time. We might as well do them the service of at least having a double-stack, irons, 9mm division that doesn't have a capacity restriction straight outta 1994.

This right here. The purpose of divisions is to allow people to choose at what level of customization they want to play in the sport. Allowing Limited-like modification in Production and Carry Optics has basically morphed them over time from something to distinct to something almost identical. This includes inane rulings like the idea that a thumb rest is not a thumb rest because it replaces the takedown pin in the gun. Saying "thumbrests aren't allowed in CO" and then having Christian Sailer win CO Nationals with a 2" metal flange on the side of his gun is confusing to people. It seems like we can't even define what a thumbrest or a compensator or a flashlight even is.

At the end of the day, a local match director wants the rules to be permissive enough to allow them to fill the match. A local match enforcing IPSC rules would mean almost every USPSA-legal gun would end up in Open because most Limited guns don't comply with Standard, most CO guns don't comply with Prod Optics, most USPSA Production guns don't comply with IPSC Production, etc. I would estimate the number of people in the country who make sure to keep their guns IPSC legal (or have the parts to swap onto the gun to make them legal temporarily) to be approximately the attendance of IPSC Nationals each year, i.e. 300-400.

"Every" is a stretch. I've heard discussions from Open shooters about how the higher pressure required to make 165 comfortably (i.e. 170 on match day) puts more wear and tear on the guns. I can't evaluate the truth of the discussion, but I've heard the concern expressed. The power factor formula measures momentum and not energy, which inherently favors heavy bullets. But the comps of Open guns reward light bullets that generate a lot of gas. An Open gun shooting a 115gr projectile at 1478 fps (to make 170pf) develops 73% more energy than a Limited gun shooting a 200gr bullet at 850 to make the same power factor. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared, so ((115 * 1478 ^ 2) / 2) / (850^2 * 200 / 2) = 1.73 . Once you factor in a custom-molded kydex shell and a metal belt mount, this isn't necessarily true. But if it were, a race holster can be customized to fit multiple gun more easily. So in the end, a race holster might end up being the more economical option, especially if you want to shoot multiple guns in different divisions. Across an entire match, I doubt if a race holster is measurably faster, but it is convenient for that reason. Also, what Ghost is doing with their Hydra P and P+ holsters is basically wrapping a shell around a race holster anyway, so the difference is quickly disappearing unless DNROI clamps down on what is considered "Suitable for everyday use" which would be the first time the current DNROI has narrowed rules in any way that I'm aware of instead of expanding what's allowed. At the end of the day, what we want to avoid in writing gear rules is allowing anything that is such an advantage that it becomes a de facto requirement to be competitive, for example compensators. The goal is write rules that create a sandbox in which multiple viable options can be tried against each other.

According to ChuckS's archive of rulebooks, the 2019 rulebook is the first one to mention the 3lb for all trigger pulls alternative.

What restrictions are those? You are allowed to change to aftermarket grip panels to make the gun fit your hand. That said, in general I agree with you. A restrictive division is not everyone's cup of tea. I think having a dot division that's more permissive than Production but less permissive than Open makes sense. To me that's where things like thumbrests belong. You can customize the gun to that level, but you're competing against other folks who have made the same choice.

I agree. I think defining allowable tolerances, like "takedown levers can protrude no more than .X inches away from the frame" and then allowing innovation within that box is probably more sustainable long term. The Production gun list is increasingly unenforceable with the number of models and variants. We should perhaps just have a set of criteria the gun has to meet to be legal, and then objectively check for those on match day.

Accidental triple post. Please delete.

Accidental triple post. Please delete.

From the beginning, Production was special and different. In every other division, a change to the gun was allowed unless it was prohibited (optics and compensators in Limited, for example). Production flipped that on its head and was the place where you could only do the only things that were explicitly allowed. By changing that one fundamental constraint, you got a division that was different in many ways from all the others. So I think having Production be the single division that has a trigger pull weight test is not unreasonable. Production is not meant to be the "shoot the gun you already have" division necessarily, although it's possible the gun you already own might meet its criteria. It was meant to be the "leave the gun how it came from the factory division". Leaving the gun stock is not everyone's cup of tea, but it was mine and I'd like for us to go back to having something resembling that, the way IPSC still does. And of course, I'd like to see the same distinction between a Production Optics and a Limited Optics. CO started out as Production with a dot, but turned into Limited with a dot incrementally. First capacity going from 10 rounds to 140mm magazines, then removing the weight limit, then allowing milling beyond the minimum necessary to add the dot, and eventually allowing effectively any part except the serialized component to be changed to an aftermarket one. At this point, for all functional purposes, CO already is LO. We should recognize some people want to shoot that and have that as an option. But I think there's still demand out there for a stock irons and stock optics division in our sport.

This is a very interesting case study. Every club around here in central NC one way or another does setup the day before the match. So shooters are very conditioned to roll up an hour before the match and be able to just walk stages with targets already hung, etc. Last month, we had quite a bit of standing water in the shooting area on one bay and another shooter and I were digging trenches to drain it and spreading sand to give traction. And guys were getting in our way because they just kept walking the stage. I was so shocked I didn't say anything, but I should have. Being able to put on a big match for big numbers is cool, but if it were a smaller group where everyone pitched in, that definitely seems like it would be more satisfying. Build relationships by working together, not just silently walking stages and nodding and waving to each other while you game out a club match like it's Nationals. I'm as guilty as anyone of doing that, but I'm always conscious of the effect on the culture.