Cowboy Action: Good, Bad, Ugly
15 April 2013 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dime_novel_heroNow that I have purchased three more guns, I have all the equipment I need to participate in Cowboy Action Shooting. This weekend was the first match of the season at Logan’s Ferry and the theme was the old TV series F-Troop.
No, I’m not quite old enough to remember F-Troop during its initial run but I remember the reruns.
The Good
When all the shooting was over and all the scoring was done, I didn’t completely suck. There were 30 shooters and I came in fifth from the bottom, which was an improvement over the last time where I would have been dead last were it not for someone else’s safety penalty.
I talked to some more people about steampunk, explaining why I was wearing a Japanese katana with Union Cavalry uniform and why I had pair of FAL magazine pouches on my boot. I hate mentioning contemporary and Victorian era authors, getting blank stares, and then having to resort to “Wild Wild West” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” movies to get a glimmer of understanding.
Please, Hollywood, give me better steampunk examples.
I tried a few experiments with a small action cam on my hat for that "first person shooter" effect. It was OK for pistol but the way I hold my head when shooting a rifle or shotgun means the camera is pointing in the wrong direction.
The Bad
When I made a mistake, I tended to get a little flustered and did not recover well. In one match I missed a target and, since my rifle was empty at that point, my brain switched back to a previous match where you reloaded your rifle. I reached into my pocket and grabbed an extra round before realizing that in this match that was not how it worked. Lost time.
There is a target called a Texas Star. It has small steel plates on a wheel that when you knock off one of the plates, the weight of the other plates changes the balance of the wheel and it spins. The smaller plates were harder to hit and I did not keep a good sight picture and missed a lot. I need to remember to take my time and get a good site picture and hit the target even if it takes a few more seconds.
Remember, a miss is a 5 second penalty. If you take 4 seconds to aim you are still ahead of the game. Four seconds is a very long time.
One of the scenarios had the backstory where the Captain has been kidnapped by Indians and you have to dress up as an Indian squaw and entice them before the shooting begins. “Yoo-hooo! Loco Brothers!” needed to be done in a falsetto. The silly wig I could handle. I’ve worn wigs before. The falsetto, however, that wasn’t happening. I tried and I simply could not get my voice to go high. I ended up hissing with no sound coming out. And when I did get a sound it was, as best, a cracking tenor.
It was good enough.
And now to the ugly part that makes me wonder if I have made a terrible mistake.
“Can you believe that someone has actually come up with a rain tax? They want to charge a tax to buildings and malls with large parking lots because of rain run off.”
I could not help but step into this conversation, saying, “You are obviously not from Etna or Pitcarin where development upstream destroyed the mechanisms of natural runoff and their towns have been flooded multiple times. It seems reasonable for me to have the people who cause the problem pay to fix it.”
Others seemed to disagree and quickly went to the libertarian end of how onerous it is for the government to require people to pay taxes, they don’t have the right to do that and the constitution isn’t in effect anymore anyway.
I walked away.
Other conversation that I walked away from included the words bitch, cunt, chink and fag.
And while I grew up just this side of the same boonies that these troglodytes come from, I have stepped into a much larger world. It may seem strange to say that the friends that I associate with; the Klingons, the science fiction people, the steampunks, they are all living in the 21st century and have outgrown the idea that the 1950s were some sort of “Golden Age” where women stayed at home to cook and clean, homosexuals were deep in the closet, the black people were in their place running elevators and picking crops and the white guys who ran things didn’t have to apologize for being white guys running things.
I may shoot with these guys but they will never, ever be my friends.
I wonder how pervasive these attitudes are. Perhaps I happened to run into the handful of tea bagger, misogynist, racist homophobe exceptions and the rest of the people are modern humans. I am not encouraged in looking through three issues of the newspaper of the Single Action Shooting Society and not seeing a single person of color.
How long before I can no longer keep my moth shut for the sake of civilized gunplay against steel targets and open my liberal mouth to tell people how repulsive I find their antiquated behavior?
No, I’m not quite old enough to remember F-Troop during its initial run but I remember the reruns.
The Good
When all the shooting was over and all the scoring was done, I didn’t completely suck. There were 30 shooters and I came in fifth from the bottom, which was an improvement over the last time where I would have been dead last were it not for someone else’s safety penalty.
I talked to some more people about steampunk, explaining why I was wearing a Japanese katana with Union Cavalry uniform and why I had pair of FAL magazine pouches on my boot. I hate mentioning contemporary and Victorian era authors, getting blank stares, and then having to resort to “Wild Wild West” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” movies to get a glimmer of understanding.
Please, Hollywood, give me better steampunk examples.
I tried a few experiments with a small action cam on my hat for that "first person shooter" effect. It was OK for pistol but the way I hold my head when shooting a rifle or shotgun means the camera is pointing in the wrong direction.The Bad
When I made a mistake, I tended to get a little flustered and did not recover well. In one match I missed a target and, since my rifle was empty at that point, my brain switched back to a previous match where you reloaded your rifle. I reached into my pocket and grabbed an extra round before realizing that in this match that was not how it worked. Lost time.
There is a target called a Texas Star. It has small steel plates on a wheel that when you knock off one of the plates, the weight of the other plates changes the balance of the wheel and it spins. The smaller plates were harder to hit and I did not keep a good sight picture and missed a lot. I need to remember to take my time and get a good site picture and hit the target even if it takes a few more seconds.
Remember, a miss is a 5 second penalty. If you take 4 seconds to aim you are still ahead of the game. Four seconds is a very long time.
One of the scenarios had the backstory where the Captain has been kidnapped by Indians and you have to dress up as an Indian squaw and entice them before the shooting begins. “Yoo-hooo! Loco Brothers!” needed to be done in a falsetto. The silly wig I could handle. I’ve worn wigs before. The falsetto, however, that wasn’t happening. I tried and I simply could not get my voice to go high. I ended up hissing with no sound coming out. And when I did get a sound it was, as best, a cracking tenor.
It was good enough.
And now to the ugly part that makes me wonder if I have made a terrible mistake.
“Can you believe that someone has actually come up with a rain tax? They want to charge a tax to buildings and malls with large parking lots because of rain run off.”
I could not help but step into this conversation, saying, “You are obviously not from Etna or Pitcarin where development upstream destroyed the mechanisms of natural runoff and their towns have been flooded multiple times. It seems reasonable for me to have the people who cause the problem pay to fix it.”
Others seemed to disagree and quickly went to the libertarian end of how onerous it is for the government to require people to pay taxes, they don’t have the right to do that and the constitution isn’t in effect anymore anyway.
I walked away.
Other conversation that I walked away from included the words bitch, cunt, chink and fag.
And while I grew up just this side of the same boonies that these troglodytes come from, I have stepped into a much larger world. It may seem strange to say that the friends that I associate with; the Klingons, the science fiction people, the steampunks, they are all living in the 21st century and have outgrown the idea that the 1950s were some sort of “Golden Age” where women stayed at home to cook and clean, homosexuals were deep in the closet, the black people were in their place running elevators and picking crops and the white guys who ran things didn’t have to apologize for being white guys running things.
I may shoot with these guys but they will never, ever be my friends.
I wonder how pervasive these attitudes are. Perhaps I happened to run into the handful of tea bagger, misogynist, racist homophobe exceptions and the rest of the people are modern humans. I am not encouraged in looking through three issues of the newspaper of the Single Action Shooting Society and not seeing a single person of color.
How long before I can no longer keep my moth shut for the sake of civilized gunplay against steel targets and open my liberal mouth to tell people how repulsive I find their antiquated behavior?
