Paintball and traditional shooting sports occupy pretty different corners of the competitive world, but the organizational structure conversation here is worth paying attention to — because anyone who's competed in sanctioned events at any level recognizes the dynamics at play. The NXL successfully consolidated the fractured national tournament paintball scene, giving the sport a single recognizable national series for the first time. Whether you view that consolidation as healthy or monopolistic depends on who you ask. That framing maps directly onto debates we've had in USPSA, 3-Gun, and IDPA circles for years. Single governing body means consistent rules and a legible national ranking — but it also means limited recourse when you disagree with how things are run. Any shooter who's dealt with rule changes handed down without much community input knows exactly what the paintball guys are working through. The NXL doesn't publish detailed governance information, and the competitive community has historically had limited formal input into rule changes and structural decisions. This is where the comparison to organizations like USPSA gets interesting. USPSA publishes its rulebook, holds member elections, and has an appeals process — it's not perfect, but the accountability structure exists. A private entity running the only national circuit for your sport is a different animal entirely. You can vote with your feet, but if there's nowhere else to go, that's not much of a vote. All divisions compete at the same events on the same weekend, which means a novice team and a pro team are sharing the same venue, often within earshot of each other. For newer players, that exposure to high-level play is genuinely useful. That's genuinely smart event design — same reason local USPSA matches benefit from having Grand Masters in the same stage rotation as shooters running iron sights on a stock pistol for the first time. Watching someone who's really good do the thing you're trying to learn is worth more than most formal instruction. For those of you who've competed in sanctioned circuits — USPSA, IDPA, 3-Gun, whatever — how much does organizational transparency actually factor into whether you keep showing up to matches? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Practical shooting has been around long enough that most of what the industry calls "new" was actually worked out on a USPSA stage twenty years ago. Worth knowing where that comes from. The extended magazine, the compensator-equipped Open gun, the widespread adoption of red dot sights on pistols, the explosion of 2011-pattern frames -- all of it was refined in USPSA competition before it reached the broader market. When you see a pistol with a mounted optic at a gun store today, practical shooting is part of the reason that exists as a mainstream option. Next time someone at the LGS counter acts like red dots on pistols are some recent tactical invention, this is the short answer. USPSA competitors were running them on Open guns while most people were still arguing about whether optics belonged on a pistol at all. The range proved it out long before the catalogs caught up. High-round-count competition revealed reliability problems that standard testing never would -- the sport effectively became a live-fire durability lab for manufacturers. Designs that couldn't survive a season of competition disappeared quietly; those that held up built reputations that stuck. This is why I pay attention to what serious USPSA shooters run in Limited and Production — not what's popular at a gun counter. A gun that's eaten 50,000 rounds through a competitive season has been tested harder than any factory torture test. That matters whether you're buying a range gun or something that rides on your hip every day. Competition should measure real shooting effectiveness -- not just tight groups on a static paper target, but the ability to hit accurately while moving, managing time pressure, and solving stage problems that don't look the same twice. That's the whole point, and it's why one club match does more for your shooting than six months of punching paper at 7 yards. You find out real fast what you can and can't do when the timer goes off and you have to move. For those who've shot a USPSA match — which division are you running, and did you end up there intentionally or just kind of drift into it over time? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Trap gets overlooked around here compared to the 3-gun and precision rifle crowds, but if you've ever shown up to a registered shoot without knowing how your average stacks up against the field, you already understand why a regional body like PITA matters. Been seeing more questions about it lately at the club, so worth talking through. For western trap shooters who don't want to travel to Vandalia for every sanctioned event, PITA is the organization that keeps local and regional competition running. This is the whole pitch right there. The Grand American is great if you want to road trip to Illinois, but most of us are trying to build a competitive record close to home — and you need the infrastructure to make those targets count for something. Without it, you can still shoot at member clubs, but your targets won't count toward an official PITA average and you won't be eligible to compete in PITA championship events. Worth being clear on this if you're new to registered shooting. Showing up and shooting a round is fine — nobody's checking your card for fun rounds — but the moment you care about classification and championships, you've got a membership decision to make. The cost is low enough it's not really a debate. A thread on Trapshooters.com titled "R.I.P.: Pacific International Trapshooting Association (PITA)" captures some of the frustration among longtime members about organizational direction and the health of the regional club ecosystem. The club closure problem is real and it's not unique to trap — I've watched it happen across several disciplines over the years. When the local club folds, the regional body loses its operational spine. A central board can sanction all the events it wants, but if there's nowhere to shoot them, the calendar shrinks fast. How many of you are currently holding both PITA and ATA membership, and do you find the dual registration worth it or mostly redundant for how you actually compete? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Benchrest is one of those corners of the shooting world that most guys at the range have heard of but couldn't tell you much about beyond "really accurate rifles on bags." If you've ever watched someone spend forty-five minutes seating primers before a match, you've met the type. IBS is the organization that's been running the sanctioned side of that world since 1970 — and the story of how it came to exist is worth knowing. The specific internal reasons for that split are, as one longtime competitor put it, "a book within a book"—rooted in organizational disagreements that have long since faded into benchrest folklore. Classic. Every shooting organization with more than twelve members has a founding schism nobody can fully explain anymore. The practical result is two parallel bodies with nearly identical rules running competing circuits for over fifty years — which tells you something about how stubborn precision shooters can be about organizational politics. Build a legal Light Varmint rifle and you can shoot it almost everywhere. Your first membership decision matters less than your first quality rifle build. This is the kind of advice that saves a new guy from six months of hand-wringing on forums. A 10.5-lb rifle built to IBS Light Varmint spec crosses over to NBRSA, fits UBR, and gets you through the door at most Freedom matches. Solve the equipment problem first — the card you carry is secondary. IBS's public-facing information on membership costs and club locations could be more accessible. A new shooter hitting the website for the first time has to dig to find what dues actually cost and which clubs near them run registered matches. This is a real problem and it's not unique to IBS. Half the specialized shooting orgs in this country run on volunteer labor and 2009-era web design, and they lose interested newcomers before anyone ever gets to talk to them about the sport. Someone serious enough to start reloading and building a custom rifle will push through it — but that's a high bar to clear before you've even confirmed there's a match within three hours of your house. For anyone in the Treasure Valley curious about the competitive accuracy side of the sport — not just punching paper but chasing records and SOY points — IBS is the legitimate on-ramp with the deepest historical record behind it. Discussion question: For those of you who've shot registered benchrest matches — IBS, NBRSA, or otherwise — what was the actual learning curve getting your first legal rifle built and your first match entered, and what do you wish someone had told you before you started? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Milsim airsoft isn't something most of us spend much time thinking about — but MSW has been quietly building something genuinely unusual in that space since 2012, and the structural choices they've made are interesting enough to be worth a conversation even if you've never picked up an airsoft gun. The core idea from the start was to embed current and prior-service military members directly into the participant chain of command — not just as referees or safety officers, but as actual leaders players would report to and take orders from. That's a different animal than what most people picture when they hear "airsoft event." You're not running around a rec field calling your own shots — you're subordinate to an actual chain of command. For veterans who've been out a while, that's either going to scratch an itch or feel like a Monday morning staff meeting with BBs. The veteran cadre integration isn't a marketing angle — it shapes how the event actually runs. Players aren't just showing up to shoot BBs at strangers. This is the part that should get the attention of anyone who does force-on-force training seriously. The organizational structure is the product here — not the gear, not the setting. Forty hours continuous with real logistics, actual mission orders, and someone above you who knows when you're cutting corners is closer to a training environment than most civilian shooters ever get access to. Read the TACSOP before you buy a ticket. If the document sounds like something you want to live inside for 40 hours, you'll probably love it. If it sounds like homework, you probably won't. Honestly one of the more honest pieces of event marketing I've read. Most event producers sell you the highlight reel — this one is telling you upfront that there's a governing document and you need to internalize it before you show up. That's either a filter or a feature, depending on who's reading it. For anyone who's done force-on-force, formal shooting competitions, or any kind of structured team training — how much does the organizational structure of an event affect whether you get something useful out of it, and how much does it just get in the way? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going down a 3D archery rabbit hole this week — relevant to anyone here who runs a bow alongside their firearms or uses off-season archery to stay sharp on distance reading and trigger discipline. The ASA piece covers more ground than most of us probably need, but a few things stood out. Prior to organizations like ASA, 3D archery existed largely as an informal extension of bowhunting culture -- clubs ran their own shoots with their own rules, and there was no national competitive structure to speak of. This mirrors exactly where a lot of local gun sports were before sanctioning bodies standardized things. IDPA, USPSA — same story. The informal era is fun until you want your score to mean something outside your home range. You're not shooting at a paper bullseye on a flat range; you're ranging a foam deer standing in a creek bed or a turkey on a hillside, then putting an arrow where it counts. This is the part that translates directly to practical shooting skills — unmarked distances, real terrain, no target stand to give away the range. Any shooter who's ever misjudged a distance on a field course knows that reading your environment is a skill that atrophies without practice. 3D archery is one of the better ways to work it without burning powder. Who benefits most from ASA membership: competitive 3D shooters who travel to multiple events per year, hunters who use the competitive circuit to sharpen their shooting during the off-season, and club organizers who want the credibility and structure of Federation affiliation. That middle group — hunters using it as off-season training — is probably the most practical fit for a lot of people in this area. Keep your eye calibrated through summer, show up to elk season with actual recent reps at unmarked distances. The 37-states footprint with 13 states having no Federation presence is a real issue if you're somewhere without local club access. Worth checking the map before assuming membership does anything for you at the local level. For those of you who run both a bow and a gun — how much crossover do you actually notice between your archery practice and your field shooting? Does working unmarked distances with a bow carry over when you're behind a rifle or handgun at unknown ranges? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Skeet has one of the better origin stories in shooting sports — a dog kennel owner in Massachusetts cuts a practice field in half because his neighbor complained about getting peppered with birdshot, and somehow that accident becomes the modern skeet field. That kind of context matters when you're trying to understand why the sport is set up the way it is. Skeet shooting didn't start as a competitive sport -- it started as a solution to a practical problem... Hunters who wanted to stay sharp between seasons needed somewhere to practice, and trap shooting wasn't cutting it -- it didn't replicate the crossing and incoming shots a field hunter actually faces. This is worth keeping in mind if you're a bird hunter who's never walked a skeet field. Station 4 high house is basically a driven bird. Station 7 is the going-away shot you see on pheasant. The geometry was designed to replicate real field angles, not to be a carnival game — and it shows when you run it with an open choke and field loads. The classification system sorts competitors by ability -- AAA, AA, A, B, C, and D classes -- so you're generally shooting against people close to your skill level rather than getting smoked by a former national champion in your first registered shoot. The class system is what makes registered shoots worth entering for average shooters. I've seen guys show up to a local fun shoot, have no idea what the classification structure is, and leave feeling like they wasted their entry fee. Knowing you're in D-class and shooting against other D-class is the difference between a competitive experience and an expensive lesson in humility. The multi-gauge format and classification system the NSSA developed have been broadly adopted as the template for how recreational clay target sports organize competitive access across skill levels. Most shooters only run 12-gauge and call it done, but the guys who shoot All-Around are working a different problem every time they step to the pad — a .410 on station 8 is not the same exercise as a 12-gauge on station 8. If you've got a reloading bench and some time, running all four gauges through a season will do more for your fundamentals than a lot of other practice methods. What gauge do you find most useful for practical field prep — and have you ever shot a registered NSSA event, or stuck to fun shoots at your home club? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Field target doesn't get nearly enough conversation in shooting circles, even among people who geek out over precision rifle. The discipline is older than most people realize — the first formal event happened behind a pub in Sussex in 1980 — and it's been running organized national competition in the US since 1987. That's almost 40 years of keeping a niche sport structurally intact on volunteer hours and $25 club dues. Worth understanding. The core challenge is range estimation. There are no laser rangefinders in sanctioned competition. Shooters use the parallax adjustment on their scope to focus precisely on the target and read the distance off a calibrated wheel — a technique that takes real practice to do accurately and quickly. If you've ever dialed parallax at the bench and noticed how fussy it is to nail the exact focus, that's essentially the whole game in field target. Now do it fast, under match pressure, on a 15mm kill zone at 45 yards. That's a skill set that translates directly to any precision shooting you do — your wind calls and range estimation don't care what the projectile is. Field target is genuinely one of the more technically demanding shooting sports you can participate in, and it's almost entirely skill-dependent once you have competent equipment. The entry cost compared to even a modest centerfire precision setup is significant. A competitive PCP airgun and a decent scope will run you real money, but not "custom rifle and a brass tumbler and dies and a Kestrel" money. And you can put a course together in a backyard. That's not nothing when range time is expensive and ammo costs keep climbing. AAFTA's most concrete achievement is sustaining an organized national competition structure for a niche discipline over nearly four decades. The volunteer-dependent model is both the strength and the ceiling here. It keeps overhead low enough that the whole thing stays alive on small dues — but if your state doesn't have an active affiliated club, AAFTA effectively doesn't exist for you. That's a real gap for a lot of the country. Anyone here shoot field target locally, or know if there's a club operating anywhere in the region? Curious whether anyone's come at this from a precision rifle background and what the learning curve looked like. Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Three-gun has always had a legitimacy problem with the broader public — not because the sport isn't legitimate, but because nobody outside the shooting world ever saw it. 3GN spent nearly a decade trying to fix that, and it's worth knowing what they actually accomplished and where they fell short. The idea was that even someone who'd never heard of 3-gun could understand "that guy hit it first." That's smart course design for a TV audience, but it's a real departure from how most of us experience 3-gun. When you're running a stage at a local match, you're racing the clock and your own mistakes — not a head-to-head shoot-off. The format change made sense for cameras, but it wasn't the sport most club shooters were practicing for. A shooter could work up through local club matches, qualify at a regional championship, and potentially end up competing against Daniel Horner and Lena Miculek at the national level. That pipeline was genuinely valuable — and it's the part of 3GN that doesn't get enough credit. A lot of shooting organizations exist almost entirely for the guys already at the top. Having a structured path from your local affiliated range all the way to a national championship gave average competitors a reason to care about their club match scores beyond bragging rights at the gun shop counter. What 3GN didn't do well was build anything that could survive its ownership's exit. When the owners decided to walk away, the organization collapsed rather than restructuring. This is the quiet lesson here. USPSA has survived decades of internal arguments because it has member governance — it's slow, sometimes frustrating, but it doesn't evaporate when one person loses interest. 3GN moved fast because it didn't have that friction, and it collapsed for exactly the same reason. Something to think about the next time someone pitches you on a privately-run league structure over an established one. For those who ran 3GN Club Series matches — what was your experience with the ranking system and the match pipeline, and did it actually feel connected to the Pro Series or more like a separate thing wearing the same logo? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Steel Challenge doesn't get enough credit as a training tool. Most people think of it as a gateway drug into competition — and it is — but the format will also expose trigger control problems faster than a hundred dry-fire sessions at your own pace. The format is disarmingly simple. No movement on most stages. No fault lines to step over. No procedural penalties for how you engage targets. You hit steel, you stop the clock, you add up your times. That simplicity is a feature, not a consolation prize. When you strip out the movement and the procedural complexity, the timer becomes the only honest judge in the room. You can't blame a bad run on a fault line call or a miss-scored hit — it's just you and the clock. The stop plate mechanics are critical: you can shoot the other four targets in any order, but the stop plate is last. Hit it early and you eat a three-second penalty per missed primary — catastrophic at these speeds. Three seconds sounds manageable until you realize the world record on Smoke & Hope is 6.81 seconds across four runs. A single procedural penalty doesn't just hurt your stage — it can wreck your entire division placement at a match. The discipline teaches you to be deliberate even when you're going fast, which is a skill that transfers. One more thing worth noting — thirteen equipment divisions means there's almost certainly a slot for whatever you're already running. Your carry gun in Production, your 10/22 in Rimfire Rifle Irons, your buddy's PCC he built over the winter. The barrier to showing up with what you have is genuinely low. What's the first gun you'd run at a Steel Challenge match — and are you already competing, or still on the fence about it? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Fullbore rifle shooting has one of the quieter international governing bodies in the shooting world — most American shooters couldn't tell you ICFRA exists, even if they've shot Palma-style matches or dabbled in F-Class at their club. Worth understanding what the organization actually is and isn't before the 2026 F-Class Worlds at Bisley. No optics, bipods, or rests permitted — equipment limited to sling and shooting jacket. That's 1,000 yards with iron sights, a sling, and whatever wind-reading ability you've built over the years. If you've ever tried to call wind consistently past 600 on a match day, you already know how humbling that is — at 1,000, you're not just reading the flag at the line anymore. F-Class targets add an extra scoring ring at the center — half the diameter of the smallest TR ring — to account for the inherently tighter groups achievable from a supported position. That's the part F-Class newcomers don't always appreciate until their first match. The supported position buys you a lot, but the scoring ring shrinks to match — you're still being pushed toward a standard that would embarrass most unsupported shooters even on a clean day. ICFRA was formally founded in July 2003, absorbing the Palma Council's functions and giving the 2003 Palma Match its first official status as a World Team Championship. The Palma Match ran for over a hundred years before it had a formal world championship body behind it. That's a long time to operate on tradition and handshake agreements — and it somehow worked well enough that the discipline survived intact. The discipline was created in Canada by George "Farky" Farquharson — the F stands for his name. Spent a fair amount of time at the LGS counter over the years listening to people debate what the F stood for. Farquharson deserves the credit — he built something that spread from Canada to Kenya and Mongolia. That's not nothing. For those of you who've shot F-Class or TR at any level — did you know which international body governed your division's rules when you started competing, or did that only matter once you were looking at nationals or beyond? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Benchrest shooting is one of those corners of the sport where the obsession goes deep enough to make precision rifle guys look casual. We're talking five-shot groups measured in thousandths of an inch at 100 yards, handloading treated as a discipline inside a discipline. The NBRSA has been the organizing body for that world since before most of us were born. This is a sport where shooters obsess over seating depth in thousandths of an inch, chase sub-0.1-inch groups at 100 yards, and treat handloading as its own discipline nested inside the larger one. I've known a few benchrest guys over the years, and this line sums them up exactly. The reloading bench isn't just prep — it's half the competition. If you've ever thought you were being careful with your loads, spend an afternoon with a serious benchrest shooter and recalibrate your definition of careful. The practical effect is a fragmented record system — a world record under NBRSA rules and a world record under IBS rules aren't the same thing, even if they're shot by the same person with the same rifle on the same day. This is the part that would drive me crazy if I were competing seriously. You can shoot the best group of your life and it only "counts" under whichever org sanctioned that match. Before you write a check to either organization, find out what your local clubs are actually running — otherwise you're building points and records in a system that doesn't apply to where you shoot. The mentorship program is worth flagging too. Most shooting organizations at the national level are pretty much a card, a magazine, and a membership number. Having regional directors who will actually walk newer shooters through rifle tuning and match procedure is a real differentiator — benchrest has enough of its own vocabulary and technique that coming in cold from the precision rifle world is humbling. For those of you who've crossed over from PRS or any kind of precision shooting — what was the adjustment like getting into benchrest, and did you go NBRSA, IBS, or both? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Most shooters know SAAMI the way they know the NRA safety rules — they've absorbed the results without thinking much about where it came from. Worth spending a minute on the actual history here. These are voluntary standards -- no federal law mandates compliance -- but the practical reality is that any manufacturer selling into the U.S. commercial market follows them. Departing from SAAMI specs on a commercial product is a liability and a reputational problem that no serious manufacturer wants. This is the part that matters when you're standing at the reloading bench or buying a case of range ammo. The reason you can drop Federal brass into a Glock chambered to a Sig's spec and have it run fine is because everyone at every point in that chain built to the same numbers. Nobody forced them to. They just don't want the lawsuit — or the reputation of the guy whose gun grenaded at the range. In 1926, representatives of all smokeless powder producers, every major ammunition manufacturer, and most major firearms makers met and formally founded the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute. The first order of business was a mass culling of redundant product: by the time they were done, shotshell load variety had been reduced by 95 percent and metallic cartridge loads by 70 percent. Four thousand shotshell loads. Think about that the next time you're annoyed that your local shop doesn't carry your preferred 2¾" turkey load. The shelves were a mess and supply chains for the raw materials were already stressed coming out of WWI. Cutting 95% of that down in one meeting is the kind of thing that sounds impossible until you remember that the people in the room were the ones making everything — they had every incentive to simplify. In 1928, SAAMI funded wildlife surveys conducted by Aldo Leopold across nine Midwestern states -- work that directly shaped Leopold's landmark 1933 textbook Game Management and established the foundation of modern wildlife management through regulated sport hunting. Most people in the gun store have heard of Leopold but couldn't tell you who funded the fieldwork that made his name. The shooting industry was directly bankrolling the science that eventually produced regulated seasons, license structures, and the whole framework that keeps game populations healthy enough to hunt. That connection between the range and conservation runs a lot deeper than bumper stickers. What's a case where SAAMI specs — or a violation of them — actually showed up at your bench, your range day, or a gun shop conversation? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Filed McDonald the same day Heller came down. That's not a coincidence — that's an organization that had a case ready to go the moment the court gave them the opening. Most people know SAF exists but couldn't tell you what they actually do. Worth fixing that. SAF filed McDonald v. Chicago the same day Heller was decided. Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities through the Fourteenth Amendment. That ruling is the reason your carry permit isn't just a federal courtesy that Chicago can ignore. Before McDonald, a city could theoretically ban handguns outright and hide behind the argument that Heller only constrained federal law. That's not academic — that was the actual legal landscape in 2010. SAF operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means it can accept tax-deductible donations but faces restrictions on direct political lobbying — a key structural distinction from its sister organization CCRKBA. This is the part most people skip over and probably shouldn't. SAF fights in courtrooms, CCRKBA fights in legislatures — Gottlieb built two separate tools for two separate jobs. Your donation to SAF funds litigation, not phone banking. Whether you think that's a better use of money than a lobbying org is a fair debate, but at least understand what you're funding. SAF's relationship with the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) is more complicated — both organizations are actively litigating Second Amendment cases post-Bruen, sometimes on parallel tracks in the same circuits. They occasionally coordinate, occasionally compete for plaintiff pools. Parallel litigation in the same circuits can cut both ways — sometimes you want multiple bites at the apple, sometimes you get bad precedent from a weaker case that poisons the circuit before the stronger case gets there. FPC and SAF both doing post-Bruen work isn't automatically good news. Case selection matters as much as caseload. Between SAF, FPC, and the NRA's legal arm, there's no shortage of Second Amendment litigation happening right now — which one do you actually support financially and why? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Most shooters I talk to at the club have never thought much about muzzleloaders past "that's the stuff they used at Rendezvous." The NMLRA has been quietly running since 1933 — which, to put that in perspective, is before most of the centerfire cartridges we argue about daily even existed in their current form. The founders recognized that without an organized effort, the skills, techniques, and historical knowledge surrounding these firearms would disappear with the generation that still remembered them. That's not a small thing. Traditional longrifle building, patching and loading technique, black powder casting — these are genuinely perishable skills. Once the people who learned them from people who used them are gone, you're working backwards from books. The Gunsmith Seminar they run sounds like exactly the kind of hands-on transfer that actually works. For anyone who shoots black powder with any regularity, this adds up. The bulk black powder pricing alone is worth paying attention to if you're shooting black powder with any frequency. We've all had that conversation at the LGS counter about powder prices — bulk program pricing negotiated directly with manufacturers is a real benefit, not just a membership brochure filler item. Members can bring a child, grandchild, or new shooter to the bench where a qualified instructor walks them through safely loading and firing a muzzleloader at no cost. Low-pressure, no-cost, instructor-led — that's a better new shooter onramp than most clubs offer for any discipline. Putting a kid behind a muzzleloader is also a genuinely different experience than a .22 range day, and it tends to stick with people. For those of you who've shot black powder — whether it's a flintlock, a percussion cap rifle, or a inline during deer season — what got you into it, and do you still run it alongside your modern stuff? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Been paying attention to GOA a lot longer than most people realize — they've been operating in Idaho's backyard politically for decades, and the Firearms Freedom Acts they helped push through in 2010 included this state. Worth knowing what the organization actually is before you decide whether it belongs on your membership card. Richardson's philosophy was laid out explicitly in his book Confrontational Politics, which argued that political fights are contests of competing ideology — not negotiations to be managed. That worldview became GOA's operating doctrine. That framing explains a lot about how GOA behaves in D.C. — and why it drives the NRA's institutional types crazy. If you believe every "reasonable compromise" is just a ratchet clicking one direction, you end up with a very different lobbying strategy than if you believe half a loaf is worth protecting. GOA frames its mission around reclaiming rights already lost, not just defending the current status quo — a distinction that shapes how it chooses legislative and legal battles. This is the part that actually matters to me at a practical level. Most gun rights organizations are playing defense. The NFA, the Hughes Amendment, the whole machine gun registry situation — those aren't positions GOA is willing to call a baseline. Whether they can actually move the needle backward is a different question, but the posture itself is worth something. GOA has publicly criticized the NRA for supporting the Hughes Amendment (1986 machine gun registry closure), handling of bump stock legislation, and a pattern of accepting legislative half-measures. The bump stock thing specifically — I've had that conversation at the LGS counter more times than I can count. A lot of NRA members were genuinely blindsided by that one. GOA's critique isn't just noise; there's a documented pattern there and shooters who've been around long enough have watched it play out more than once. What's one specific piece of legislation — federal or state — where you think a no-compromise position actually changed the outcome, versus situations where you think it just meant losing with your principles intact? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Precision rifle competition was a scattered mess before 2012 — good matches existed, but there was no way to know where you stood relative to anyone outside your local circuit. The PRS fixed that, and the numbers back it up. The combination of real-world shooting positions, unknown distances, time pressure, and the ballistic problem-solving required to connect at 800-plus meters gave the sport a depth that punched far beyond a typical square-range competition. This is exactly why guys who've been shooting bench or F-Class for years end up humbled at their first PRS-style match. Knowing your load is one piece — getting into a weird barricade position under a timer while your andreneline is up is a completely different problem. I've watched excellent riflemen struggle with this transition and love it anyway. The Rimfire Series deserves more credit than it typically gets. Running a .22 LR or similar rimfire platform in a PRS-style match is genuinely useful training — same positions, same stage designs, same time pressure — at a fraction of the cost per round. This is the most underrated on-ramp in competitive shooting right now. You can run hundreds of repetitions at position work and barricade transitions without lighting your ammo budget on fire. If you're new to precision rifle and you're not starting here, you're making it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Coaching a shooter mid-stage is prohibited. You get your data, you get your position, and you run the clock yourself. That rule is what gives the sport its teeth. Your prep, your dope, your execution. The equipment arms race gets attention, but the guy who can cold-bore a target at unknown distance from an improvised position — that's what the PRS is actually testing. The PRS essentially created the infrastructure that turned an informal outlaw match scene into an organized national sport with international reach. Mongolia and Zimbabwe are on that list. That's a long way from 164 shooters in 2012. For anyone thinking about getting into this — the Regional Series at $60 and a rimfire setup is a reasonable starting point that won't require you to refinance anything. Where did you first get into precision rifle competition, and what caught you off guard the most when you made the jump from square-range shooting? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time digging into the history of SASS lately, mostly because a guy at the Nampa gun shop was trying to talk me into trying a monthly club shoot. Long article, but a couple things stuck with me. This isn't a sport for people who want to run a flat-dark-earth carbine in a chest rig. That's the most honest single sentence I've read about CAS in a while. The gear list before you fire your first sanctioned shot — two single-actions, a lever gun, a period shotgun, and a costume that passes inspection — is a real number. Worth knowing that going in rather than finding out after you've shown up underprepared. The organization's relationship with the firearm industry is significant — the CAS format created and sustained demand for a specific category of firearms that manufacturers like Uberti, Cimarron, EMF, Taylor's & Co., and others have built substantial catalog segments around. This is something most people outside CAS don't think about. The reason you can walk into a shop today and find a decent selection of Uberti clones at multiple price points is largely because SASS created a consistent buyer base with defined legal specs. That's a real institutional accomplishment — the rulebook essentially became a product standard. The founding-year discrepancy — 1986 versus 1987 — is a minor housekeeping issue that an organization in its fourth decade should have resolved by now. Fair point. Forty-plus years in and your own anniversary post and your current handbook disagree. Someone in Akron ought to make a phone call. For those of you who've shot a CAS match — did the gear investment feel worth it once you were actually at the line, or did it take a few matches before the whole thing clicked? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going down a rabbit hole on IHMSA this week after a conversation at the LGS counter about single-shot pistols — figured this was worth bringing here. The 1975 Tucson match alone is worth knowing about. Jeff Cooper, Ray Chapman, J.D. Jones, and the AutoMag guys all in the same informal match is a remarkable collection of people to have at the founding of anything. That's not nostalgia — it means the sport's DNA came from people who were serious about what handguns could actually do at distance. The mechanical demands of hitting a small steel target at 200 meters with a handgun pushed development in barrels, stocks, triggers, and optics that eventually filtered into the broader pistol market. The Thompson/Center Contender is the obvious example here, but this trickles down in ways most shooters don't connect back to silhouette. Next time you're fussing with a trigger job on a hunting pistol or a scoped single-shot, that equipment path came through this sport. Scoring is binary: the target falls, you get a point. It doesn't fall, you don't. Simple until you're standing unsupported with a handgun trying to ring steel at 200 yards. There's nowhere to hide in that format — no partial credit, no procedure points, no way to game the scoring system. Your cold trigger control either works or it doesn't. The discipline genuinely makes you a more precise handgun shooter. Hitting a ram-sized target at 200 meters with a handgun, standing unsupported, requires you to actually develop skill — you can't shortcut it with gear or spray-and-pray. This is where the comparison to run-and-gun competition gets interesting. USPSA and IDPA will absolutely sharpen you, but the feedback is different. Silhouette is slow, deliberate, and brutally honest about your fundamentals. The adrenaline isn't from movement — it's from knowing the next shot is all you. Anyone here shot IHMSA matches, either currently or back in the heyday — and if so, what did it do to your handgun shooting overall? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time reading up on USA Shooting this week — mostly because a buddy at the club keeps pushing me to look into how Olympic-discipline shooting actually works organizationally, and I figured I'd dig in. A few things worth chewing on here. Shooting has been part of the modern Olympics since the first Games in Athens in 1896, making it one of the oldest continuously contested Olympic sports. Most guys at the range don't realize just how deep this runs. We're not talking about a sport that got added to chase relevance — rifle and pistol competition predates the NBA, predates the NFL, predates almost every sport casual fans follow today. The sport saw significant attention during the Cold War era when U.S.-Soviet medal rivalries made rifle and pistol events genuinely compelling television. Interest ebbed somewhat in the post-Cold War period but has seen renewed energy through standout athletes who've built public profiles across multiple Olympic cycles. This tracks with what I've seen just locally. The energy around Olympic-style shooting comes in waves — and right now it feels like an up cycle, especially on the shotgun side. Vincent Hancock competing across four Olympics will do that. For recreational shooters who aren't pursuing ISSF-style competition, the membership value proposition is thinner. Honest assessment. If you're shooting IDPA or three-gun on weekends and nobody in your squad is running air rifle, a USAS membership isn't going to change your life. Know what you're actually buying before you sign up. The NRA Foundation has been a recurring grant source for USAS national team programs — the $250,000 grant in February 2026 being a recent example. Worth understanding the distinction here — USAS is an Olympic governing body, the NRA is a membership and advocacy organization, and the NRA Foundation is the charitable arm that writes checks for programs like this. Three separate things that people constantly collapse into one. The grant relationship makes sense; the governance relationship doesn't exist. On the shotgun side specifically, 2025 was a standout year. Team USA's shotgun squad posted 46 international medals and two World Championship titles. 46 medals in a single season is not a small number. If you shoot any flavor of clay targets — sporting clays, trap at your local club, skeet on a lazy Saturday — those results came from a pipeline that runs all the way down to junior programs and sanctioned club competition. It's connected to what we do at the grassroots level whether we think about it or not. For guys who've shot ISSF-style disciplines — air rifle, air pistol, Olympic trap or skeet — how did you first get connected to that world, and did it change how you shoot other things? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team