Ammo pricing pressure has been building for a while, and Winchester just put hard numbers to what a lot of us have been feeling at the counter. Their Q4 2025 results make for pretty uncomfortable reading. Winchester's Q4 2025 earnings nearly evaporated, dropping from $42 million to just $600,000 compared to the same quarter a year earlier. That's not a typo. A $41 million quarterly collapse is the kind of number that forces decisions — and those decisions don't stay inside the boardroom. They end up on the shelf tag at your local gun shop. When a manufacturer this size bleeds that badly, price increases aren't a maybe, they're already written. The post-COVID ammo surge created a glut of inventory in the distribution channel. Manufacturers like Winchester cut prices to keep product moving. That worked until the raw material costs made it unsustainable. This is exactly what happened. Retailers were sitting on pandemic-era stock and discounting to move it — which felt great if you were buying, but it was masking what copper, brass, and propellant were actually costing. That math is done now. The window where you could grab quality centerfire at lower-than-normal prices is closing, and it's not coming back soon. If you reload, watch brass and propellant pricing closely — those inputs are under the same cost pressure hitting Winchester. The reloading bench doesn't insulate you from this — it just delays it. Powder and brass are sourced from the same markets. If you've been putting off stocking up on Varget or H4350, or you're low on brass for a caliber you shoot heavy, now is a better time to act than six months from now. Curious where everyone's at on this — have you already noticed price creep at your local shops or distributor, and are you adjusting your buying habits heading into 2026? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Two things collided this week in a way that should make every permit holder stop and think — because they can't both be true at the same time. "The administration that spent last week urging the Supreme Court to strike down Hawaii's carry restrictions spent this week arguing a lawful gun owner deserved to die for carrying at a protest." That's not a partisan shot — that's just the timeline. You can't file a brief defending public carry rights on Monday and then have your FBI director go on TV Friday to say a legally armed man had it coming. Pick a lane. FBI Director Kash Patel said on Fox News: "You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple." Except it's not that simple — and it's not Minnesota law. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, the NRA, and GOA all called this out directly. When the groups that normally carry water for an administration are publicly correcting its top law enforcement official on basic firearms law, that's worth paying attention to. Especially if you carry and think your permit means something. University of Minnesota Law professor Megan Walsh, who specializes in the Second Amendment, put it plainly: "He was lawfully carrying a firearm, and that is not any license to kill someone." The weapon had already been removed before the shots were fired. Whatever you think about the broader circumstances, that's the detail that matters — and it should matter to anyone who carries daily, because the principle at stake is whether lawful carry itself can be used to justify force against you. The Wolford ruling this summer will likely extend Bruen further into everyday carry situations — stores, restaurants, parking lots. That's a real win on paper. But a legal right that gets you shot in the street for exercising it isn't much of a right. Here's what I want to know from folks who carry regularly: Has the Pretti situation changed how you think about carrying at public events — protests, rallies, anything with a law enforcement presence — even where it's clearly legal to do so? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

PRS season is spinning up, and if you're planning to shoot any ranked matches this year, membership registration is already open across all three series — PRO, Regional, and Rimfire. Without one, you can still shoot PRS-affiliated matches, but your scores won't count toward any regional or national standings. That's the part guys miss. You show up, shoot a solid match, feel good about your andex — and none of it appears anywhere. Paying the entry fee but skipping the membership is like reloading ammo and forgetting to seat the primer. Don't wait until the week of your first match to buy in. Some regional match hosts require proof of membership before you can register for the event itself. This one will bite you. Match slots in the region fill fast, and if you're scrambling to sort out your membership the same week registration opens, you're probably watching from the waitlist. Sort this out now, while there's nothing else urgent on the calendar. BGC hosts and supports PRS-affiliated events locally, so if you've been thinking about getting into precision rifle competition — or you shot a match last year and want your scores to actually count this time — getting the right membership tier sorted before your first match is the whole job right now. What series are you running in 2026 — Regional, PRO, Rimfire, or mixing it up — and what pushed you toward that tier? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

SHOT Show dropped a lot of product this week, and as usual there's a mix of "finally" and "who asked for this." A few things actually caught my attention as things that'll matter at the range or on your hip — not just in a glass case. The grip has been redesigned with better contours, a grooveless front strap, undercut trigger guard, and thumb rests that mimic what gunsmiths have been doing for years in their shops. Glock basically looked at what every grip stippler and custom shop has been charging $150–300 to do, and baked it into the factory gun. If this holds up in practice, a lot of Gen5 owners are going to be mildly annoyed. Engineers told media the low cost wasn't achieved by outsourcing or cutting corners. That's the kind of thing you say when people are already skeptical — which means the skepticism is warranted. A 5-lb single-action trigger and a Delta Point Pro cut at $549 is either a genuinely good value or a warranty claim waiting to happen. Put a few thousand rounds through one first before you bet your carry setup on it. The 7mm Backcountry gets three new loads built around the Peak Alloy case for high velocity from shorter barrels — specifically useful with suppressors. Between this and Federal's new subsonic rifle line, both ammo companies came in hard on suppressor-friendly offerings. If you've been running a can or thinking about getting one, the ammo side of that equation keeps getting easier. What's on your list from SHOT 2026 — and is there anything here you'd actually put money down on before reading a round-count review from someone who isn't a sponsored shooter? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Florida's gun law picture has changed a lot in the last three years. Constitutional carry in 2023, open carry in 2025 — and now the Legislature is still pushing. Worth keeping an eye on where this is heading. Rep. Tyler Sirois (R-Merritt Island), the bill's sponsor, framed it differently: the 2018 age restriction was a reaction to a tragedy, not a constitutional policy, and 18-year-olds who are legally adults shouldn't be denied a right the Constitution protects. Hard to argue with the logic. You can sign a contract, vote, join the infantry, and get handed an M4 at 18 — but buying a rifle at a Florida gun store requires waiting three more years. The inconsistency has always been the weakest part of the 2018 law. The pattern is consistent: House passes it, Senate ignores it. That's been the outcome since 2023. Four sessions in a row now. At some point the House vote stops being a push for change and starts being a campaign document. The more interesting development is the AG saying he won't defend the age floor if the NRA takes it to SCOTUS — that's the thread worth pulling. For guys who frequent Idaho ranges, this might feel like background noise from another state — but federal case law on purchase age cuts both directions and lands everywhere. Discussion question: Anyone here remember buying their first long gun at 18, or did you run into age restrictions at your local shop — and did it actually change anything about how you started shooting? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Been carrying and watching guys carry the P320 platform since it showed up at every gun counter in America. The Pretti shooting in Minneapolis has this conversation going again, and it's worth paying attention to — especially if one lives in your safe right now. The 2020 Hartley settlement covered refunds for prior repair costs and a lifetime warranty against cartridge failures. It did not cover personal injury claims from gunshot wounds, and it did not address unintentional discharge allegations. That's a settlement that solved a paperwork problem while the actual liability question walked out the door untouched. If you're a P320 carrier who assumed the 2017 upgrade plus the class action settlement put this to bed, that gap matters — especially if you're ever on the wrong end of an incident. In April 2025, Sig Sauer successfully lobbied the New Hampshire legislature for a law shielding the company from P320 liability lawsuits. A manufacturer lobbying for legal protection from its own customers isn't a great look — and when you hear that at the gun shop counter, it tends to quiet the room. The legal remedy being the only remedy is already a problem. Shrinking that remedy further just moves the stakes onto the individual carrier. There's no federal agency with authority to compel a firearms manufacturer to issue a recall — unlike cars, toys, or power tools. Every recall or safety notice you see from a gun manufacturer is voluntary. This is the part that doesn't get said enough. When your truck has a brake issue, NHTSA can force a fix. When your carry gun has a discharge complaint history north of 100 allegations, the manufacturer decides whether to act — and how far. That's the environment you're operating in every time you strap on a firearm, P320 or otherwise. If you've got a pre-August 2017 P320 and haven't done the Voluntary Upgrade Program, that's a free fix and there's no reason to sit on it. Beyond that, the holster fit point is real — full trigger guard coverage isn't optional on this platform, and I've seen plenty of kydex rigs at matches that didn't meet that bar. For those of you who carry or have carried a P320 — has the discharge history ever factored into your decision to keep it, replace it, or change your holster setup? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett

Ran across this guide while thinking about how many people move here from out of state and immediately start asking the same questions at the gun counter — what clubs are active, where do I show up, what do I need to bring. Worth breaking down a few things from it. Idaho has a surprisingly deep competitive shooting scene -- if you know where to look, you can shoot something almost every weekend of the year. That's accurate, and it's something even longtime Idaho residents don't fully appreciate. I've talked to guys who've lived here twenty years and had no idea SEIPS was running NRL22 and ICORE on top of USPSA out of Pocatello. The ISRPA calendar is legitimately useful — one bookmark covers most of the state. If you bookmark one page, make it the ISRPA match calendar -- it pulls in events from clubs across the state covering every discipline. Seconded. Before that calendar existed, you were piecing things together from three different Facebook groups and a club website last updated in 2019. PractiScore fills in some gaps too, but ISRPA has the broader picture including shotgun and rimfire events that don't always show up there. Every new shooter overthinks this. You almost certainly already own a gun that qualifies for competition. This comes up constantly at the LGS — someone asks what they need to start shooting USPSA and they've already got a Glock 19, a Safariland holster from their carry setup, and three magazines sitting in a range bag. They're done. The only thing holding them back is not knowing that. The article's equipment breakdown is honest about this in a way a lot of club websites aren't. One thing worth noting for first-timers at ISPS: the "first-timers shoot free" policy at the Nampa matches removes the last real excuse. You can show up, watch a stage, ask questions between runs, and figure out if competition shooting is for you without spending anything beyond your ammo cost. For those who've made it to their first match in Idaho — what discipline did you start with, and would you make the same call again knowing what you know now? Read the full article in The Handbook →

Been thinking about youth shooting programs lately after a conversation at the counter over at Sportsman's Warehouse — a dad asking where to start his 10-year-old. I pointed him toward 4-H Shooting Sports. Here's why. Youth development first, marksmanship second — the program uses shooting as a vehicle for building character, not the other way around. That framing matters more than it sounds. Programs that lead with competition tend to burn out kids who aren't immediately good — or worse, they attract adults who care more about the scoreboard than the shooter. The fact that 4-H flips that priority is exactly why it produces shooters who actually stick with the discipline long-term. The program also explicitly targets youth who aren't traditional athletes, recognizing that precision sports don't require the physical attributes that exclude many kids from conventional team sports. This is something most people outside the shooting community genuinely don't understand. I've watched a kid who gets cut from every rec league absolutely clean house on the smallbore line because he has patience and steady hands. That's a real thing — and 4-H is structured to find those kids and give them somewhere to belong. A county with an active, long-tenured certified instructor running a well-equipped club will look nothing like a county where the only option is a club that meets twice a year with borrowed equipment. That's the honest caveat. The national structure sets a floor, but local execution is everything. If you're thinking about getting your kid involved, the first call is to your county Extension office — not to find out if the program exists, but to find out whether it's actually active and who's running it. The NRA Foundation provides equipment grants and funding to state 4-H Shooting Sports programs... This funding relationship draws occasional criticism from opponents of the NRA, who argue it blurs the line between an educational youth program and a firearms industry advocacy pipeline. The criticism exists, but I've never seen it play out at the club level. The instructors I've known who ran 4-H programs were there because they wanted to teach kids to shoot safely — full stop. Equipment grants paid for .22s and air guns that a county club couldn't have otherwise afforded. You can have opinions about the NRA as an organization and still acknowledge that the Friends of the Banquet money went somewhere useful. For anyone who's been through 4-H Shooting Sports — either as a kid or as a volunteer instructor — what discipline did you start with, and did it actually translate into how you shoot today? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Archery and firearms share more DNA than most people admit — both are precision sports built around breath control, trigger (or release) discipline, and reading conditions. A lot of serious rifle shooters I know came up through or alongside the archery world, and the organizational structure USA Archery runs is genuinely worth understanding if you're thinking about how governing bodies work for Olympic-pathway sports. Those two goals don't always point the same direction, and the tension between them shapes a lot of the organization's structural decisions. Every shooting organization I've ever dealt with wrestles with this same problem — do you fund the elite pipeline or keep the club shooter happy. USA Shooting has the same friction. When resources are finite, "grow the sport" and "win medals" are often pulling against each other, and whoever's loudest in the room that year usually wins the budget fight. USA Archery operates as a nonprofit NGB under the framework established by the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, which defines the rights and responsibilities of USOPC-recognized governing bodies. This is the structural piece most people skip over, and they shouldn't. The Ted Stevens Act is why USA Shooting — not the NRA, not the NSSF — controls who goes to the Olympics with a rifle or pistol. Same framework here. Exclusive authority to select athletes comes with real strings attached, including athlete representation requirements and SafeSport compliance that the organization can't just opt out of. In February 2026, USA Archery announced a three-year partnership with Bluestone Equity Partners, specifically positioned around the buildup to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games. Private equity money flowing into an NGB timed to a home Olympics is worth watching. Could mean real infrastructure investment. Could mean the organization spends three years chasing optics over substance. We'll know more by the time LA wraps up. For those of you who've shot through USA Shooting, IDPA, USPSA, or any other sanctioning body — where have you seen the "elite vs. grassroots" tension actually play out in a way that affected your local club or your ability to compete? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time this week going down a rabbit hole on youth shotgun programs after watching a kid at our Tuesday trap league absolutely dust birds that were giving grown men trouble. Turns out there's more infrastructure behind programs like this than most of us realize. The program is team-based by design. Every athlete competes as part of a squad, nobody sits the bench, and the structure is built around adult volunteer coaches rather than school athletic departments. That detail about no bench matters more than it sounds. Every kid who shows up shoots. No politics, no playing time drama, no coach's kid getting preferential treatment. That's actually a harder thing to build than it looks — most sports organizations can't pull it off. Shooting rewards focus and consistency over physical size or athleticism, which opens the door to athletes who get screened out of other programs early. This is the part I'd put in front of any parent whose kid got cut from baseball or quit soccer because he wasn't built like the other kids. The range doesn't care how tall you are. I've seen 140-pound teenagers run 25-straight while the linebacker next to them was fighting a gun that was too long and a sight picture they couldn't read. School affiliation is encouraged but not required, which means a club or community group can field a team without needing a school administrator's sign-off. That's quietly significant — especially here in Idaho where a lot of rural kids aren't near schools with athletic programs that would ever touch a shotgun. One coach, one kid, $70 in registration fees, and you've got a legitimate team with a $10 million liability umbrella over you. That removes most of the excuses a range or club would give for not hosting one of these. In 2025, SCTP added a new layer with International Regional Championships — a direct response to growing interest in the Olympic disciplines and the need for more pathway events between club-level shooting and nationals. The bunker trap and international skeet pathway has always been the quiet serious lane inside this program. The gap between club-level American trap and competing internationally is enormous — adding regional championships in those disciplines gives athletes who are actually trying to chase that pipeline somewhere to measure themselves before nationals. That's a real structural improvement. For those of you who've coached youth sports of any kind — what's the single biggest thing that keeps a program from getting off the ground locally, and do you think the low barrier to entry here (one coach, one athlete) actually solves it or just moves the problem somewhere else? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Youth shooting programs don't get nearly enough attention on this forum, and that's a shame — because the pipeline from scholastic programs to serious competitors is where a lot of the sport's future lives or dies. The roots of the SSSF trace back to 2001, when the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) launched a scholastic trap program to introduce young athletes to clay target shooting through structured, coach-led teams. The concept worked — participation grew fast enough that the program expanded to include skeet and sporting clays within a few years. I've seen this firsthand at club level — trap is genuinely one of the best entry points for young shooters. The fundamentals transfer everywhere, the equipment barrier is manageable, and a squad format means the kid isn't just standing there alone looking confused. Starting with structure matters. The SSSF Basic Shotgun Coach Certification Program...delivers a 13-unit online curriculum covering equipment, safety, marksmanship fundamentals, mental game, team management, and ethics. It requires an 85% or better pass rate on unit quizzes and a final exam, followed by a mandatory in-person range day with hands-on evaluation. That's not a rubber-stamp certification — that's an actual standard. Compare that to how most youth sports coaches get "certified" and you'll understand why this is worth calling out. The in-person range day requirement especially matters — you can pass a quiz about muzzle discipline without ever demonstrating it. The mandatory background checks, tiered coach certification with real pass/fail requirements, and $10M liability coverage aren't window dressing — they reflect an organization that has thought seriously about the duty of care involved in putting adults and kids together on a range. Any range officer or club administrator who's ever had to explain liability to a nervous board member knows exactly why this line matters. The $10M policy covering registered athletes, coaches, and volunteers at sanctioned events is the kind of thing that either exists or it doesn't — and a lot of local programs are operating without it and just hoping nothing goes sideways. If you've had a kid come up through SCTP or SASP — or coached one — what did the transition into adult competition actually look like for them once they aged out of the scholastic program? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time putting together a breakdown of the NSCA for anyone who's been curious about how the organization actually works — what it does, what it costs you, and whether the membership makes sense depending on how you shoot. Worth a read before you decide whether to register for that sanctioned shoot at Eagle this season. Without a governing body setting consistent rules, registered shoots across different states would have no common standard for fair competition. The classification system — which ranks shooters by performance so you compete against people at your own level — only works if everyone's scores feed into the same database under the same rules. This is the part that matters most if you travel to shoots. Your class follows you. Show up somewhere you've never been, and you're not starting over or getting bumped into a division that doesn't fit your skill level. For anyone who's ever gotten smoked at an unfamiliar course by someone who "just wanted to try the sport," this system is the fix. The Crossfire program is underrated. If you shoot both sporting clays and skeet with any regularity, paying one membership to access registered events in both disciplines is a straightforward win compared to holding two full memberships. I've talked to guys at the LGS who didn't know this existed and were paying separate dues for years. If you shoot any NSSA skeet nights and also want your sporting clays scores to count, look into Crossfire before you renew anything. One area where the NSCA gets occasional criticism from within the community is responsiveness to rule changes and course design evolution. Sporting clays as a sport continues to develop, and some competitors feel the association moves slowly when the membership pushes for format updates. Every member-run organization has this problem — it moves at the speed of whoever shows up to vote. The pathway to influence is real, but you have to actually use it. Complaining at the gun counter doesn't change much. For those of you who shoot registered NSCA events — has the classification system put you in the right bracket, or have you felt over- or under-classified at a sanctioned shoot? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going down the RMEF rabbit hole this week and figured it was worth bringing to the forum — a lot of us hunt elk or know someone who does, and this organization is doing work that affects those tags directly. On May 14, 1984, four elk hunters from northwest Montana -- a pastor, a realtor, a logger, and a drive-in owner -- pooled their time and money to formally establish RMEF. They had noticed that organizations existed to look after ducks and turkeys, but nothing was dedicated specifically to elk. Forty years later and 9.1 million acres conserved. That's a hell of a return on four guys noticing a gap and doing something about it instead of complaining about it at the gas station. The early days were genuinely scrappy. RMEF set up in a doublewide trailer on a vacant lot outside Troy, Montana, with borrowed money and drained bank accounts. The founders mailed 43,000 brochures promising a magazine and an annual convention. Fewer than 250 people responded -- less than half a percent. That response rate would bury most organizations before they started. They honored the commitment anyway, borrowed more money, and hand-delivered magazines to grocery stores. That's the kind of organizational backbone that either works or doesn't — apparently it worked. RMEF played a prominent role in defeating Colorado Proposition 127 in 2024 -- a ballot measure that would have banned mountain lion and bobcat hunting and broadly restricted wildlife management tools. This is where membership dollars do work you can actually point to. Prop 127 wasn't just about lions and bobcats — it was a template. Defeating it matters for every state watching how those ballot fights play out. The chapter structure is decentralized by design -- local chapters raise funds independently through banquets and events, and a portion of that money flows back to fund projects in or near the chapter's geography. This is what separates a banquet dinner from a charity dinner. When money raised in your county goes back to your county's elk habitat, people show up and bid seriously. I've seen chapter banquets move real money precisely because the room knows where it's going. How many of you are current RMEF members, and if you've attended a local chapter banquet — did you see the funds actually stay local, or did it feel more like money disappearing into a national org? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

FITASC is one of those organizations that most American shotgun shooters interact with indirectly — you've probably shot a FITASC-format round at a club without thinking much about where those rules came from or who wrote them. Worth knowing a bit about the structure behind it. Rather than chasing Olympic relevance, FITASC doubled down on its own championships and formats, building a structure parallel to the IOC-affiliated shooting world rather than subordinate to it. That decision has held up well over a century. The IOC's shotgun disciplines are heavily formatted and constrained — FITASC Sporting is genuinely harder to organize but a much better test of a shooter. Anyone who's gone from standard sporting clays to a FITASC-format event and had to remember the gun-down rule for the first time knows there's a learning curve with teeth. The parcour format rewards consistency across a long sequence in a way that a single-station stand doesn't fully replicate. This is what makes FITASC humbling in a useful way. You can't bail yourself out with one good station. The menu card tells you exactly what's coming, and you still get beat by it — the gun-down mount, one shell on a single, targets designed to punish overconfidence. It's the closest clay target shooting gets to a real hunting scenario where you have to run a whole field well, not just hole eight. The 1988 New System adoption is genuinely interesting history — an Australian federation solves a capacity problem that a Paris-based organization couldn't crack internally, and they just ran with it. Old-style FITASC capped out at 288 competitors at a World Championship. The current system handles 1,200 plus. That's not a minor tweak, that's the whole sport becoming viable at scale. For those of you who've shot FITASC-format events at local clubs — how did your first encounter with the gun-down rule change how you thought about your mount in standard sporting clays afterward, if at all? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going down the FPC rabbit hole after a conversation at the LGS counter last week about where membership dollars actually go. Worth breaking down for anyone who's been on the fence about supporting them versus the usual suspects. FPC's stated goal is to "restore the essential right to keep and bear arms in the United States" through strategic litigation rather than traditional lobbying. The NRA spent decades playing the political endorsement game and writing checks to congressmen. FPC's bet is that durable wins come through the courts, not election cycles. After Bruen, that bet is looking smarter than it did ten years ago. The Fifth Circuit granted an injunction that specifically exempted FPC members from enforcement of the ATF pistol brace ban — converting membership dues into tangible legal protection. This is the one that made me take FPC seriously. If you own a braced pistol and you're in the Fifth Circuit, that injunction wasn't abstract — it was the difference between legal and not legal while the case wound through the courts. That's a membership benefit you can actually point to, not a bumper sticker and a hat. FPC president Brandon Combs issued a pointed statement noting that FPC had opposed the bump stock ban from day one — including when it was a Trump administration action. A lot of organizations went quiet on the bump stock ban because the politics were uncomfortable. FPC opposed it regardless of who was signing the rule. That consistency matters if you're trying to figure out whether an organization actually has principles or just has a team jersey. Worth noting they did take a 7-2 loss at the Supreme Court in VanDerStok on the ghost gun rule — so they're not batting a thousand. Anyone who tells you litigation is a clean strategy is selling something. For those of you who carry or own braced pistols — have you ever made a membership or donation decision based on specific litigation outcomes, or do you just pick an org and write the check? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Precision rifle competition didn't come from a boardroom — it grew out of people dragging their rifles into the field and building stages around real terrain. The NRL is one of the two major organizations that put formal structure around that chaos, and if you've been curious about how it all fits together, this breakdown is worth your time. The NRL entered as a second major sanctioning body, deliberately carving out a different niche -- more community-oriented match culture, explicit outreach to women and youth, and a multi-tiered competition pathway designed to onboard new shooters without throwing them straight into a national-level match. That tiered pathway is the part that actually matters for most of us. I've watched guys show up to a PRS-style match cold, get smoked, and never come back. Having a rimfire entry point with real national score tracking changes the math — you can get your reps in, learn the positional shooting, and not feel like you're funding someone else's trophy with your match fee. NRL22 is the entry point. Everything runs on .22 LR -- same stage format, same positional shooting, same timed engagement philosophy as centerfire, but at a fraction of the ammunition cost and with essentially no recoil. This is the thing I keep telling people at the shop counter. Your .22 is not a practice tool — it's a legitimate competition platform. The fundamentals you build at an NRL22 match transfer directly to centerfire. And when a box of 6mm brass costs more than a brick of .22, that's not a trivial point. Stage design varies widely and is largely left to the match director's creativity within safety constraints. Competitors have engaged targets from helicopters, old vehicles, purpose-built barricades. The lack of standardization is either a feature or a bug depending on who you ask. On one hand, it keeps things fresh — you're not memorizing a rulebook, you're solving a problem on the clock. On the other hand, if you show up to your first match and the stage brief says "start position: inside the cab of a '78 F-150," that's a lot to process in 90 seconds. The intent is to make the sport stick for people who show up once, not just for the competitors who were already going to keep coming back. The post-match bowling nights and pig roasts sound like fluff until you've actually been to a match where nobody talks to each other. Community is what keeps a club alive between seasons — that's as true here as it is at any USPSA or IDPA club I've been part of. For those of you who've shot an NRL22 or centerfire NRL match locally — did the social side of it actually hold up, or was it just a scoreboard and a parking lot? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Ran across a breakdown of IHEA-USA recently and a couple things in it are worth chewing on for anyone who's been through hunter ed, volunteers as an instructor, or has ever wondered how that whole system actually holds together. Hunter education in the United States is standardized enough that a course completed in Florida is recognized in Montana. That interstate reciprocity is something most hunters take completely for granted — myself included, until I read that it took decades of alignment work across agencies that answer to entirely different state governments. Next time you tag out in a state you didn't grow up in on the strength of a card you earned 20 years ago, that's not an accident. A significant number of people complete their hunter education course, buy a license, and then never actually go hunting. This is the part that hit closest to home for me. I've watched it happen with newer shooters at the club — they get their card, maybe show up to a range day or two, and then quietly drift. The gap between passing a course and actually being a functional hunter in the field is real. Hunters Connect is apparently their answer to it, built around video content and practical skills for people who have the credential but not the confidence. Whether it actually moves the needle is a separate question, but at least someone is naming the problem. The piece on Pittman-Robertson funding is worth a read too if you've never connected those dots — every box of ammo you buy has a federal excise tax baked in that flows back to state agencies and funds the free or near-free hunter ed courses most of us took. Your range ammo budget is, in a small way, subsidizing the next generation of hunters. How old were you when you went through hunter ed, and how much of what you actually use in the field did you learn there versus figuring out on your own later? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent a decent chunk of last fall in a blind outside of Nampa watching pintails work the decoys, and it got me thinking about who actually keeps the habitat in shape that makes those mornings possible. Most hunters know the name Ducks Unlimited, but fewer know how the machine actually runs. The founding logic was straightforward: most North American waterfowl breed in Canada, and the breeding habitat — the wetland-rich Prairie Pothole Region stretching across the northern Great Plains and into the Canadian provinces — was being lost faster than anyone was acting to protect it. DU set out to raise money in the United States, then put it to work restoring and protecting breeding habitat north of the border. That cross-border model still holds today, and it matters every time you watch birds funnel down a Pacific or Central Flyway. The birds don't care about the border. Neither does the habitat math. In FY2024, for the first time in the organization's 87-year history, DU delivered more than 1 million acres of conservation in a single fiscal year — roughly the land area of Rhode Island. In FY2025, that number climbed to 1.2 million acres, marking back-to-back years above the million-acre threshold. That's not just a press release number — that's real ground that produces real birds. If you've noticed better seasons in recent years on certain flyways, some of that traces back directly to what those chapter banquets are funding. The Gun of the Year program, launched in 1973 with a limited-edition Remington Model 1100, is DU's most recognizable firearms-related initiative... The program has raised more than $250 million for wetlands conservation over its 50-year run. I've handled a few of these at local chapter dinners and at the gun counter at Snake River Shooting Products. Some are safe queens — engraved, unfired, collecting dust. Others have been run hard through decades of duck seasons, which honestly seems like the better fate for a working shotgun. Either way, $250 million in conservation funding from people bidding on shotguns at banquet tables is a number worth sitting with. How long have you been involved with your local DU chapter, and have you ever taken home a Gun of the Year — and if so, is it still in the safe or has it seen some water? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

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