Pin Shooters mark your Calanders

Bowling pin Shooters it is that time of year again. The first Bowling pin shoot of the year is just a couple of weeks away.



Load up on ammo and wipe the winter dust off your guns and come on out to the Lincoln Izaak Walton league range March 26th 2006.

The event is open to all Caliber classes from twenty-two on up.

If you are new to the game check out the web site for the Nebraska Pin Shooters. The site has just about all of the information that you'll need.

The concept for Bowling Pin shooting was first started by Rich Davis the original maker of Second Chance Body Armor. In the early days in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of his product to the various police departments Rich would kneel down, shoot himself in the chest with a revolver and then turn the firearm on 3 bowling pins set up some feet away.

Since a bowling pin closely aproximates the scoring area of the FBI target Rich proved that an officer could take a hit in the vest and still fight back placing rounds in the center mass of a violent adversary.

These demonstrations turned into a yearly competition called the Second Chance Shoot. It was vastly popular for over a decade. Second Chance body Armor stopped sponsoring the national shoot years ago, but people did not stop shooting pins.

There are still club sponsored shoots all over the country and it is a sport that can get a shooter hooked after only a competition or two.

Massad Ayoob in his book "Hit the White Part" writes that pin shooting combines all of the elements needed for serious self defense practice; Stress and muliple reactionary targets.

Paraphrasing Ayoob from Memory

The stress part comes from competing man to man. (Two shooters stand on the firing line engaging 5 or more pins, the first shooter to put all pins on the ground advances)

Mutiple targets means the shooter must be sure of his/her accuracy moving to the next target before the last one is off the table and on the ground. (Most shooters will shoot once at each pin and then scan back across the table eliminating any that have not yet fallen to the ground)

Since the targets are reactionary the shooter has immediate verification of a hit, miss or wound.
(target falls over but is still on the table.)

As previously mentioned a bowling pin closely aproximates the lethal zone on the FBI Q target, so speed and accuracy is definately the order of the day.

As a final note the I would like to address a few mistakes that I see most novice pin shooters make their first few times out.

The first is going to fast. This causes a lot of misses and frustration. Better to concentrate on accuracy. Speed will come by itsself if you let it.

The second is concentrating too hard on one pin. Many new shooters upon missing a pin will continue to shoot at that pin until they get it off the table or run out of ammo. Concentrate on one shot to one pin for all five pins then sweep back across the table picking up those that were missed or only knocked over on the table. remember they have to hit the ground.

For an in depth look at bowling pin shooting I highly recommend Ayoobs book "Hit the White Part". It was written many years ago, but it is still the definitive work on the sport of pin shooting.

Copies can be ordered through any of the major book reatailers like Barnes & Noble. They can also be ordered from Ayoob directly on his Lethal Force Institute web site. If fact all of Ayoobs available books and CD's can be ordered directly from him. So if you have been wanting a copy of something and haven't been able to locate it, you'll find it there.