Thursday, August 15, 2013

Facilities.

The Crimson Trace Midnight 3 Gun Match is epic fun and I was all on board with the idea of nighttime 3 Gun shooting catching on and becoming A Thing, but last year Frank James pointed out to me the very real logistical barriers, which are:
  1. The tally of facilities big enough to host a really sprawling 3 Gun match, especially one with stage guns like M249s, is a fairly small number, and

  2. The number of those facilities that are located someplace where you can cut loose with belt-fed machine guns at 0300 and not have someone call the cops can maybe be counted without having to take the mitten off your other hand.
COSSA certainly fits the bill, being a sprawling range complex on 600 acres of nothing out in the middle of BLM Nowhere. You could run one at The Facility Formerly Known As Blackwater. Maybe a couple others? It'd be a short season right out of the gate.

It's a pity, because CTC is really on to something with this idea. Did I mention that there's a stage that starts with you shooting a 40mm grenade launcher at a car? Yeah. Epic fun.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have our night shoot in October so were start earlier and knock off by 2100.

Gerry

Tam said...

Dude, the shooting started at 2100 and didn't knock off until 0400, and they only ran half the match last night.

Even accounting for the fact that this was the first night with the ROs and most of the Media types "pre-running" the course, the full match for the actual competitors on Fri-Sat is slated to run almost thirteen hours, bell to bell, spread across two nights.

Anonymous said...

Dudette,

That's way past our bed time. It's dark by 6:oo PM at that time of year so we get 6 stages done in 5 hours.

The night match in Puryear starts at 9:30 and drags on until 2:00 AM

If I'm up at 0400 someone is getting shot and not by accident.

Gerry

Scott J said...

My range runs an evening IDPA-ish match the 4th Thursday of each month.

Shooting starts at 18:00 and we can legally shoot until 21:00 but try to knock off by 20:30 so the gate key logs show everyone left by 21:00 in case the neighbors make a stink (Alabama law says we can legally shoot 09:00-21:00 without being hassled about noise). We do 4 stages.

Of course being IDPA that means no lasers or WMLs. However, some dissatisfaction expressed by the match director about the attitude displayed by HQ over the new rule book makes me think things might be less IDPA-ish in the future.

If that happens I just hope I can convince SWMBO I need something other than that Tomahawk GP I spent $160 on a couple years ago :)

Scott J said...

Oh, forgot to mention that means we shoot in full dark 4 months a year and from shadowy dusk into full dark two others.

Then there's two where you get two stages in the light and two in the dark.

And then 4 where we don't even have to break out lights at all.

So CTG might be able to make a pretty full schedule work if they confined it to Winter months.

Joseph said...

How about adding the ability to pay for said M249 & Grenade launcher as well as ammo isn't something most shooters would be able to do.

Unless you host a gun TV show, blog or gun rag, you don't get invited to shoot other folks toys often (read never).

Scott_K said...

I can think of several places large enough for a sprawling 3 Gun match and where 0300 gunfire is common enough that no one bothers to call the cops.

The main problem with them is that you really don't want to be in those Chicago/LA/NY/NJ neighborhoods.

Will said...

I think FrontSight would be large enough, and noise shouldn't be a concern, as I've attended a night time class held there in July (no day classes in high summer, IIRC).

As far as I know, no competitions have ever been held there. No idea why.