Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Competitive Shooting Is NRA HighPower Dying? If So, Why?

LOL. I"d like to think you are right. And likely so, mental and physical game was starting to jive a bit.

Regardless of accomplishments, it sure was fun, and meeting and shooting with folks of your caliber, made it some of the best years of our lives!!! Carolyn and I really enjoyed it!

Keep your head low and watch your six as always!

Jeff

It's been dying in my area. I think all that's mentioned plus the emergence of other shooting games like precision rifle etc.

I backed off a few years ago when components were scarce and travel was expensive.

For fun I would much rather shoot a novelty match like Garand or bolt action service rifle these days.

The youngsters much prefer tactical or scoped equipment games.

Want to try your true personal ability play the smallbore and HP silhoutte game. It's dieing too , people want to think they are the stud , blow and go than come shoot a match and see they really suck a** and never show back up.

We had a lot of fun with smallbore silhouette. Sure helped our offhand shooting too. Even though it was scoped.

never had a close HP range though for the metal. Sure would have liked to try thta too.

I hate to say it but the nation as a whole sure seems so much into instant gratification, that any work on their part seems to be a non issue, IE they don't want to do it so if they can't win the first match with no practice, they give up.

They all want to "run and gun" in 3 gun matches and pretend that they're in Delta. They don't know what accuracy is.

Run and gun is a little more practical than putting on a funny jacket and oven mitt to put ten shots downrange on a stationary target...

"Practical" for what? HP teaches marksmanship.

We used 3 gun type stuff as cross training

Instead of being elitist snobs like I used to be when doing years of archery only hunting, we became aware that every thing has its place.

The run and gun stuff really really helped our highpower as did other cross training.

And if you think 3 gunners are not accurate, you've another thing coming. Its all relative anyway.

So does 3 gun, IPSC, sniper matches, etc...

Same as Sporting Clays or Five Stand has done for shotgunners.

Highpower, PPC or Bullseye doesn't have the draw they once had.

I'd actually think that the ability to shoot tiny groups would come from learning BR, which we never tried.

Then field expedient accuracy could start with various highpower including field, f class, the "sniper" type courses etc...

I know some damn fine shots involved in 3 gun, one of which is a former world record holder in bench rest. So I would never buy the notion they are not accurate.

I think Bullseye pistol helped my HP the most from a trigger control standpoint. I was always involved in many disciplines at the same time including 3d archery, skeet, trap, sporting clays along with hp/service rifle and bullseye pistol.

I have been toying with trying some precision rifle matches because there are now a few places within reasonable distance that are putting on matches.

I was saying that we needed to adopt benchrest reloading practices back when F-Class switched to the half-MOA targets. I'm not saying Highpower shooters don't pay attention to their ammo, the smaller ring size on the FC targets placed a greater demand on precision shooting.

I think in benchrest (shortrange) we generally have a better windflag system than found in Highpower. We pay more attention to the flags when shooting than mirage, trying not to shoot in a boil. Highpower shooters have a better feel for reading mirage... sometimes the flags lie

Yep, I've seen the flags flying in three different directions and only had the mirage to trust.

Somewhere there is the photo on Viale, 2 flags blowing opposite, middle one straight up...

I don't know that highpower needed BR reloading, but as the distance got further I got pickier on my ammo...

But F class cuts it all in half target wise, and lets face it, you just don't shoot the much better because you have a scope and a rest. YOu do some, but not twice as good, so something had to give... reloading techiques and building more accurate rifles had to come along.

Bullseye was great for trigger control. I really wished I had shot a 4th leg pistol match to maybe finish my pistol dist badge, but thats life. Maybe one day I'll go back and try to finish it.

RE mirage, I learned as I got to be a better shooter, that everyone can be about the same on low wind days... watching the mirage and such... and learned that, at least in service rifle, shooting in a boil was no big deal, in fact a BR shooter taught me that, and the fact I could clean a target at 600 really quick if I could break all my shots in boils if it was that kind of day.

But I also learned flags can be different lengths, materials etc... and that flags lie, BUT if you look at the overall wind and terrain you can maybe figure which flags to look at.

Bottom line was you also had to learn to wtach grass, bugs, birds, trees, leaves etc.... nature, a LOT because you could not rely on mirage at all, you could not rely on flags and so you more or less had to figure out all the other signs to rely on, incluidng your neighbor cussing....

ITs worked out very well in the game fields too since then... as you know no flags out there, but you need to read what wind does as it goes by valleys, tree lines, hills etc.... and since mirage flat lines out at low wind speeds, if the wind is enough to worry about often the only thing I can use mirage to check for is search direction for a boil to know "true" wind direction at least.

It never hurt to be on top of things and shoot fairly fast too... check it all, shoot, glance at indicators again and adjust sights if needed before you see shot location, then again if you need to tweak from shot location vs call and fire again.

Jeff in shortrange BR score shooting we're trying to hit a 1/16" dot (@100 yards), five bulls, one shot per bull. Tough to get your POA in a boil. In group shooting IF everything is perfect (gun returns to the exact POA for each of five shots) you can hammer em down quickly, IF the boil holds. In group shooting the group doesn't have to be in a specific spot on the target as long as it's in the upper section on the paper.

Yes, as noted the sports are all different and we have a gracious enough target in highpower to be able to ding as many Xs downrange as long as the boil holds, and hten the time to wait for it to come back.

If you have direction to the mirage, then you have to correct for both the wind its indicating, and the optical illusion its creating, 2 totally seperate issues that you deal with at the same time.

I can certainly see that trying to hit a specifit dot in a boil could be interesting, not only are you dealing with a horizonal error of wind and mirage, but now a vertical factor of the mirage effect, not to mention possibly the effect of a head or tail wind to compound it even more.

Not HP, but my father used to shoot smallbore back when his Winchester 52 match rifle was the hot set up. He did reasonably well, somewhere around here there's a box with a couple of dozen medals he picked up along the way.

In a lot of years of hunting out of many deer camps no one ever had to go out and help him find a deer he hit badly. Coincidence?

Never ran into a rude Service rifle shooters. They are serious folks and I'm learning why with each shoot I attend. It's serious work. I showed up at my first match with my green boxes of ammo ... problem it was ammo for my 22-250! I had three different shooters offer me ammo to get through the shoot and not one of them would take a nickel!! (my 223 ammo is now in a different colored green boxes and labeled!!)
I have folks here giving advice and assistance to get me started. My is used ... I don't even know its twist rate, but to date doesn't like 77 grain boolits. No keyholes, just poor groups. It does love 69 SMK from all distributors.

So I guess what I'm saying many folks confuse serious with rude. Ask and they will help. It's a good community IMHO. Same goes with the F-Class folks. I was starting in that until I discovered XTC styled matches (service rifle, Sporting rifle and Garand matches). I like the variety of the different positions (although I seem to suck at aweful hand).