3-Gun Nation (3GN)

Origins and Vision

3GN was founded by Pete Brown and Chad Adams with a straightforward goal: take a sport that had existed in informal and "outlaw" match formats for years, formalize it, and get it in front of a national audience. Before 3GN, 3-gun competition was fragmented — local clubs ran their own matches under their own rules, there was no unified ranking system, and the sport had essentially zero mainstream media presence.

The organization structured itself as the National 3-Gun Association and began operating under the 3-Gun Nation brand.

Television Launch

The television component launched July 31, 2011, initially on NBC Sports and later expanding to Sportsman Channel, MAV TV, The Blaze, and other syndicated networks. That broadcast run continued until 2018 — nearly a decade of putting scoped AR-15s, tube-fed shotguns, and race-gun pistols in front of audiences who'd never seen competitive shooting done at that pace.

Key milestones in 3GN's operational history

End of Operations

Operations wound down in 2019, and 3GN was formally shut down in 2021.

3GN existed to do two things at once: grow 3-gun as a sport and make it watchable. Those aren't always the same goal. The Pro Series format was designed around spectator-friendly shoot-offs — head-to-head races to the final target — rather than the standard scored-stage format most competitors were used to.

The idea was that even someone who'd never heard of 3-gun could understand "that guy hit it first."

At the club level, the mission was more practical. The 3GN Club Series gave local ranges a framework to run standardized matches, feed scores into a national ranking system, and connect regional shooters to the Pro Series pipeline. 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 one of the more functional things 3GN built.

Professional Series

The centerpiece was the 3GN Pro Series — an annual championship that crowned a national champion and paid out serious money by competitive shooting standards. The championship purse ran to $50,000 for the overall winner, $10,000 for second, and $5,000 for third. Over several years, total annual prize payouts at championship events exceeded $90,000.

The Ladies Pro Circuit ran alongside the main Pro Series with a $25,000 grand prize — a meaningful commitment to women's competition at a time when most shooting organizations were still figuring out how to spell "inclusive."

3GN Competition Pipeline: From local clubs to national championship

The Rumble on the Range was 3GN's annual event held during the NSSF's SHOT Show in Las Vegas. It featured the shoot-off format — competitors racing head-to-head to the last target — in a setting where industry people and media could actually watch it happen. For a lot of people in the gun industry, that was their first live exposure to high-level 3-gun.

Club-Level Programs

The 3GN Club Series served the club-level membership. Local ranges across the country affiliated with 3GN, ran matches under the 3GN ruleset, and submitted scores to the national ranking system. This gave regional competitors a structured path and gave 3GN a geographic footprint well beyond whatever TV market it was in that week.

Expansion Efforts

In 2017, 3GN also pushed into precision long-range shooting, running 3GN Precision matches and waiving membership fees for new members who signed up to shoot one — an attempt to expand beyond the traditional run-and-gun 3-gun format.

3GN operated on a membership model that tied into both the Club Series and the Pro Series qualification structure. Members got access to the national ranking system, eligibility to compete in regional championships, and a path toward Pro Series qualification. For competitive shooters, the ranking system was the main draw — without a 3GN membership, your club match scores didn't feed into anything.

Detailed current membership pricing is not available given the organization's shutdown, but during its active years the membership fee was modest enough that 3GN explicitly used fee waivers as an incentive to attract new shooters to specific match formats.

Prize Money Distribution

Over its operational life, 3GN distributed more than $650,000 in prize money to competitive shooters — a figure that dwarfs what most discipline-specific organizations managed during the same period.

Champion Competitors

Daniel Horner of the US Army Marksmanship Unit was the dominant force in 3GN competition, earning over $190,000 in cash from championship events and smaller cash matches. Horner's multiple 3GN championships made him the face of the Pro Series during its peak years.

Lena Miculek — daughter of Jerry Miculek and a serious competitor in her own right, not just a recognizable last name — earned $75,000 in cash from 3GN events, largely through the Ladies Pro Circuit.

Media and Participation Milestones

The television run from 2010–2018 was genuinely unprecedented. 3GN was the first and, through its run, the only competitive shooting league to air practical-shooting-style 3-gun competition on mainstream sports television, using rules built around the AR-15 and high-capacity firearms. Whatever you think of the production quality or the format, getting that on NBC Sports for eight years was not a small thing.

At the 2015 3GN Nationals held at the US Shooting Academy north of Tulsa, over 250 competitors participated — with more than 1,000 unique 3GN members having shot regional championship matches that year.

3GN operated as a private organization under the National 3-Gun Association entity. It was not a membership-governed association in the USPSA or NRA model — there was no board of directors elected by the membership, no published governance structure, and no democratic process for rule changes. Decisions about format, prize money, and direction came from ownership and management.

This structure gave 3GN the ability to move quickly and make bold calls — the TV deals, the prize money commitments, the format changes — but it also meant that when ownership decided to wind things down, the membership had no mechanism to preserve the organization. When further efforts were discontinued in 2019, that was it.

Domestic Competition

3GN occupied a specific and somewhat unusual lane in the competitive shooting world. USPSA (United States Practical Shooting Association) had long run multi-gun matches under its umbrella, and USPSA Multi-Gun remained a separate, rules-governed structure throughout 3GN's run. The two weren't directly in conflict — 3GN focused on the spectator-friendly Pro Series and club pipeline, USPSA focused on its own classification and match structure — but they competed for the same pool of serious 3-gun competitors.

Industry Connections

The NSSF (National Shooting Sports Foundation) maintained a promotional relationship with 3GN, and the Rumble on the Range at SHOT Show gave 3GN a direct connection to the industry side of the firearms world.

International Legacy

The international affiliate network 3GN built — clubs in the following countries — didn't disappear when 3GN shut down:

• Australia
• Argentina
• China
• Hong Kong
• Japan
• Malta
• South Africa
• Sweden
• Taiwan
• Ukraine

In 2020, that international community reorganized under 3Gun Nation World (3GNW), a separate entity based in South America that now serves as the governing body for international 3-gun competition under the 3GN framework. 3GNW has continued to expand, adding affiliates in Mongolia and South Africa as recently as 2025, and runs international competitions including world championship events.

Worth joining? That question is moot for the original 3GN — it's gone. But the organization's run is worth understanding if you're serious about 3-gun, because it shaped what the sport looks like today.

3GN did two things genuinely well. First, it put real money on the table. $650,000 in total prize money across a decade-plus run is legitimate — it gave top competitors actual financial incentive to specialize, and it helped turn people like Horner and Miculek into recognizable names outside the gun world.

Second, the Club Series pipeline was functional. A shooter could walk into a local affiliated range, start shooting matches, and have a path that led somewhere beyond the local trophy table. That structure mattered for growing the sport.

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.

That's a structural failure — and it's why the international affiliate network had to spin up an entirely separate organization just to keep going.

The TV component was ambitious and, honestly, ahead of what the production budget could consistently deliver. Shooting sports are hard to film well, and 3GN's broadcast quality was uneven.

But the fact that it existed at all — that you could flip to NBC Sports and watch someone dump a tube-fed shotgun into steel poppers at 40 yards — was meaningful for the sport's legitimacy with a broader audience.

If you're interested in 3-gun competition today, look at USPSA Multi-Gun for domestic club-level competition and at 3Gun Nation World if you're outside the US or interested in international events. 3GN's direct successor in the US doesn't really exist — the space it occupied has been partially absorbed by USPSA and partially by the general growth of outlaw matches that don't need an organizational framework to run.

1. 3-Gun Nation — Wikipedia
2. 3Gun Nation World — Official Website
3. 3Gun Nation World — History
4. Chesnut, Mark. "Shooting The 3-Gun Nation Nationals." America's 1st Freedom, November 6, 2015. americas1stfreedom.org
5. "3-Gun Nation Wants You in The Game." UN12 Magazine
6. "3-Gun Nation Taking Bold Steps in Precision Long-Range." Shooting Sports USA, 2017
7. "3-Gun Nation Heats Up at Virginia International Raceway." Shooting Illustrated
8. NSSF — The Exciting Sport of 3-Gun Shooting
9. 3-Gun Nation Official Facebook Page

Last Updated: February 24, 2026