Karlon N. Rama
Stage Five

GUN owners active in the local practical shooting scene will not find it hard to shoot matches based on the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA) format, regardless of what naysayers peddle.

While the IDPA format departs from many conventions in practical shooting competitions, the departure is not so radical as to render shooters totally disoriented and unable to find their way.

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In fact, many practical shooters abroad place high in IDPA matches. Similarly, many shooters who cut their teeth in IDPA land respectably in practical shooting games.

Whatever the format, shooting remains predominantly what it is--a series of individual motions that begins with the shooter and ends with the gun going off while aimed precisely at an intended target.

The requisites for equipment such as gear is totally irrelevant as far as the act of shooting is concerned. After all, a holster is a holster regardless of whether its “race” or “tactical”. It is something you sheath a gun in.

In fact, the only noteworthy departure IDPA takes from the conventional practical shooting sport is mindset.

And, if one really thinks about it, it wasn’t so much a departure as it was a return to what the late Jeff Cooper intended when he coined the phrase “practical shooting”.

Bill Wilson, Walt Rauch, John Sayle, Ken Hackathorn, Dick Thomas, and Larry Vickers, when they started IDPA in 1996, simply envisioned a shooting match not too far removed from the reality of defensive shooting situations.

They recognized that people don’t carry scoped and tricked out guns, firing hand loads designed to forgo lethal effectiveness in the name of recoil manageability and shorter spits, in very colorful holsters painted with racing stripes, when they go out to the streets.

They knew that people, the most serious shooting athlete among them, actually face the world with regular guns—some with a bit of gunsmithing done and the others out-of-the-box models—loaded with full-power factory ammunition.

So, they must have concluded one fine sunny day in Berryville, Arkansas: Why not create a shooting match that takes these facts into account and offers theseto people?

As IDPA was designed to keep as close to reality as possible, the elements the match’s design naturally gives value to is obvious—proficiency and tactical soundness—and both exist in the realm of the mind.

Proficiency is simply achieved when the shooter is able to place good hits in good time. In IDPA, a target as scoring surfaces indicated as -0, -1 and -3. This isn’t a negative integer like in high school math. It’s read down zero, down one and down three.

When shooting, the given score is the actual time it took a shooter to finish the course of fire, plus the accumulated number of down points, multiplied by half a second.

As he or she posting the lowest time wins, it is imperative to place all shots in the down zero zone as much as possible to avoid the added half-second increments.

This, I believe, is a sound system. It isn’t far-fetched to believe that two deltas in .75 of a second will be far less effective than two center-mass hits in two seconds flat when forced to resolve a critical incident.

Tactical soundness refers to the skills a shooter is able to employ to insure that he or she is able to deliver the mission-critical good hits in good time without turning himself or herself into too much of a target. This involves being able to shoot, reload and do remedial measures from the safety of cover.

By looking at an IDPA course of fire as a realistic situation that is tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving, as opposed to a static playground where one is supposed to perforate cardboard target with bullet holes, a shooter will prevail.

The need to keep these two elements in mind while shooting is about the only challenge old shooters who want to try IDPA will face. They are not likely to back down. Challenge, after all, is what makes shooting sweet.

(knrama@gmail.com)