Genghis

S&W held a Steel Challenge match in Shreveport a while back. I think they let everyone shoot S&W guns to try them out. More than ten of our local shooters bought S&W .22's as a result. They go for about $219 at gun shows, and they have a rail on top to mount a C-More. Midway USA had C-More's for sale for $189 a couple of months ago. Ruger .22's seem to work very well, too. The only problem with a C-More is the mount puts the line of sight pretty far above the bore.

I shoot a stock Tactical 5.0 in .40. The only problem I have had was a Recoilmaster that broke. STI sent me a replacement right away, and I haven't had a problem since. I like the light rail, the fiber optic sight, and the magwell that came on it. I did replace the fixed sight with a TAS. I have been thinking about having it hard-chromed or Ion Bonded, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. My one complaint about the gun is the bluing - I just don't think it's a good finish for a gun that gets a lot of work for duty or competition.

Must take a big guy to handle a pistol with a four foot barrel. Bet you get good accuracy on the long shots, though! S

Fiutak's argument fails because OPINIONS can never decide who the real national champion is. That's why it's called the "BcS National Championship," rather than just the National Championship. It's a shame that the end result of college football is decided the same way they determine the outcome of figure skating, or American Idol. Any playoff, even just a +1, would make the championship legitimate. Polls and computers can't really determine the best team in the country, but a decent system could pick the top four teams, then the best one could prove it on the field. The only sour grapes would come from the fifth or sixth best team complaining about being left out. That argument holds a lot less water than Texas arguing that they beat OU by 10, or Utah pointing to the fact that no one beat them on the field, or USC claiming that no one could beat them at the end of the season. Someone needs to decide that football is a sport, rather than a debating society.

I wonder if a CED 7000 will pick up the shots from a Nerf gun? If this gets going, I may have to borrow my daughter's Nerf Vulcan (belt fed, full auto).

Adult kid's version: http://www.geocities.com/bbmachinegun/review4.htm

I once hired a process server company to serve five subpoenas, and they managed to locate one (1) of the witnesses. They billed me for all five, and sent a collection letter. My response pointed out their inadequacies and suggested that if they chose to take legal action over the matter, they might want to hire someone else to serve me with the lawsuit.

I love the Radians' electronics. They do the best job of any set I've owned, of cutting out the shot but leaving other sounds. I've owned other sets that cut everything out for a half-second or so. At some matches that might mean you don't hear anything for minutes at a time! Two drawbacks I've noticed. First, it seems that sweat will short out the electronics after a year or two. Second, the piece that joins the earpieces together (that goes over the top of your head) seems to be made of plastic. I bought one pair then broke that piece when I tried them on.

From what I remember from Cognitive Psyc, there are three kinds of memory: iconic, short-term, and long-term. Iconic memory is what you will "see" in your mind's eye if you close your eyes right now - the burned-in image recorded momentarily in the part of your brain that receives visual input. It fades in a few seconds, and is normally not stored permanently. Short-term ("echoic") memory is your memory of what you heard in the last few seconds. For instance, most people can remember seven items in a list, plus or minus two. Long-term memory includes everything that is permanently stored in your brain. The theory is that none of this info actually disappears. Rather, "forgetting" something is actually the inability to recall it, rather than the loss of the info. Info is only stored in LTM if it is meaningful to you, or if you make an effort to remember it. For instance, you might permanently store theforementioned list of items by repeating them over and over. Or you might make up a song or sentence that uses them all in order (like Potsie did), or find some common thread that ties them together. Someone with more recent psyc classes may want to chime in and correct anything I misremembered. I can imagine you remembering certain memorable shots, whether they be particularly difficult or outcome-determinative for the match. But it would be very difficult to actually memorize an image of each shot in a match being fired.

Sounds almost as bad as the winds blowing around Austin when the Legislature is in session.

Had a problem uninstalling Norton a couple years ago. For some reason the removal tool didn't work, and neither did Add/Remove Programs. So I started deleting files, and found five or so that were really hard to delete. Eventually I got all but one deleted, but it would not go away.

I saw a video of Sevigny on a stage. When I first looked at the layout, it looked like a cluster. Dave slipped through the stage, shooting most of the targets from the middle, taking a step here, a half-step there, shooting the whole time, and he was finished before I even realized it. Maybe all the other GM's could do the same thing, but maybe not.

Any solutions to Unpossible? Here's the closest I came: http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=1008640

If she is really new to shooting, you might start her out with an NRA Pistol or First Steps course. They start with the basics, and all in all they teach the correct techniques. Their method of teaching is unmatched. Sending her to a practical shooting camp might be a bit much - she would be trying to learn the basic shooting skills (sight picture, grip, stance, trigger control) at the same time she's learning advanced skills (sight tracking, calling shots, moving while shooting, drawing, etc.). A complex skill is best learned one part at a time.

Hunting must not be very popular in Colorado - or maybe it won't be if word of this gets around. Seriously - what do they expect a hunter to do to comply with the law?

Thanks, Sean

My main Airsoft gun is a WE High Capa 5.1. After letting it sit for months, I got it out and found that several of the mags leak gas once they're charged. Can I cure this with silicone, or do I have to take the mags apart and replace the gaskets?

The tiebreaker for bullseye shooting should be a USPSA field course.

In the Germany-USA game there were 27 free throws shot (9 by Germany and 18 by the U.S.). The final score was 106 to 57, so this game would have turned out the same pretty much no matter what the refs did. But in a game decided by a few points, the refs could easily make enough difference to change the outcome. Call one or two close fouls, or let them go, and you've changed the outcome by a few points. Call one or two more fouls on a star so he fouls out. Change one out-of-bounds call, and you might be nullifying two or three points for one team and giving two or three to the other team. Call a charge or don't, the ref's decision changes the score. Count a basket after a foul, or wave it off. There are probably 50 or more decisions like this in every game, and they add up. If a ref consciously sets out to change the outcome (or the score), he can do so in most games and get away with it. I believe this is very, very rare. But even when a ref does his best to call a fair game, his decisions often make enough of a difference to determine the outcome. Human error is a part of the game, and most of the time it will even out. But when a ref consciously changes the way the rules apply (calling it tight versus letting them play), without bothering to tell the players, it's just not fair.

There's a difference between sports (or activities) with objective rules that depend on human perception (whether a wide receiver got both feet down, whether a pitch was in the strike zone, whether a bullet hole crosses the perf or the 180 was broken, etc.) and one that explicitly depends on a subjective human determination (gymnastics, diving, etc.). Some include both elements, like diving where a certain dive has a specific difficulty rating, which is combined with points assigned by judges for subjective elements to produce the final score. Basketball is supposed to be objective, but everyone admits and accepts that the refs change the way they apply the rules. For activities with objective rules, all the refs need to do is to do their best to see what really happens, then make the resulting call. Being fair with subjective scoring is not that simple.

What about basketball? It's supposed to be objective (i.e. "How many times can your team put the ball thru the hoop?") but it is common knowledge that the rules change as the game goes on. How many times have you heard: "They're calling this one tight from the beginning, to send a message." "That's a makeup call." "That's a ticky-tacky foul." "That's a hard foul." "Boy, they've really started calling a tight game since halftime." How can you possibly think it's fair to change the rules in the middle of the game? It's either a foul or it's not. With the refs making so many calls, if the game is within fifteen points or so, no one really knows who won the game. Maybe the only way to make the game fair is to find a technological solution, like the electronic scoring used in fencing. Basketball is more like gymnastics at this point.

Merlin, I think the question in that study was even more alarming. Something like, "If you could take a drug that would allow you to win an Olympic gold medal, but kill you a few years later, would you take it?"

D*mn, I wish I was good enough so all I could learn from watching videos of GM's was how to unload and show clear with style!

Practical shooting is a complex skill with many components (vision, trigger, grip, stance, movement, draws, reloads, stage analysis, and more). It really helps if you can learn one component at a time. Shooting Limited requires you to learn all of this at the same time. Shooting Open has eliminated some of the components. This lets me concentrate on improving the other components. With an Open gun you usually only have one reload per stage. You don't have to align the sights. You don't have to remember to focus on the front sight - you can just focus on the target then superimpose the dot and fire. The trigger is lighter, so you can slap it, where with a Glock or similar gun that will cause you to pull the gun off target. So when I shoot Open I can "game" a stage, take chances with longer or tighter shots, and concentrate on movement. When I go back to Limited, I find that my shooting has improved. Yesterday we shot .22's at steel. Some had dots and some were iron sights. My best time with iron sights was within .2 or .3 seconds of the best scores anyone shot with a dot.

Sounds like an awesome stage! I shot one stage with an Open gun that was basically dry (because I didn't bother to oil it after pulling it out of the safe). Had a failure to feed on basically every shot. Bang! "Sh*t" [Rack slide] - thirty-two times. I gutted it out and finished the stage. I think I only had 2 C's and the rest A's. Makes you respect the roundgun guys - if you have to work that hard for every shot, you're going to make it count. Of course my time was over 100 seconds, so my HF was nothing to write home about.