One point I make is that an Unconscious Competence level of skill, the ability to do something well on auto pilot, is a wonderful thing but not attainable on demand. When performance on demand is of the essence, I recommend ratcheting down to Conscious Competence and taking an instant to think about what you’re doing.

I change guns often. Partly because testing different ones is another thing I do for a living, partly because my students all have different guns and I have to be familiar with all of them, and partly because I simply like to do so.  A few months ago I decided to forsake my ballistic promiscuity and stick for a while with one particular style, a polymer-framed pistol I’ll call Brand A. For the most part, that plan has worked, fulfilling the advice most of us give that if you stay with one “platform” you’ll become better and more reflexive with it.

There’s another side, though, that I’ve been reminded of in the last ten days. Testing polymer-framed pistol Brand B for a gun magazine on Saturday the 3^rd at an IDPA match in Jacksonville, FL, I managed to take First Master and top score overall in the Enhanced Service Pistol division with Brand B. On the weekend of the 10^th and 11^th, I took Brand A to Clearwater for the Florida State Championships…and absolutely tanked.

I’ll tell you right now, it wasn’t a “brand versus brand” thing. I consider the two guns equal in quality and inherent accuracy and “shootability,” model for equivalent model. The first match was smaller, 122 shooters compared to roughly 300 for the second, a deeper pool with bigger sharks in it, but as the guy behind the sights and the trigger both times, I have a pretty good idea why I shot quantitatively worse with the more familiar pistol.

With the less recently familiar Brand B gun, I was focusing on its subtleties. Its grip to barrel angle was slightly different than what I’d been lately habituated to, as was its trigger reach and length of trigger reset. I was running Conscious Competence pretty much every shot. With Brand A, the old familiar extension of the hand, I found myself going auto pilot and taking overconfident liberties.  There were stages where I KNOW I relaxed my grip, where I pointed rather than aimed, where I rushed instead of pressed the trigger.

Where I took my familiar gun, and my supposed skills with it, for granted.

We do that with people, paying more attention to the new folks we want to impress than we pay with our familiar loved ones.  It hurts us in the end.  Life lesson.  We drive our friend’s new Corvette Sting Ray with more care than our own casually-handled Impala, and it does us no good at the end of the day.  Same, same.

That’s why I say that shooting – like some other sports, and other seemingly casual undertakings – can reinforce for us the more important lessons of Life.

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Randi Rogers turned in her usual stellar performance, capturing the women’s championship. Her mid-teen protégé, Tori Nonaka, won the junior championship.  Tori bested both genders in her age group to claim her title, and Randi kicked a lot of male boo-tay on her way up the scoreboard, too.

This pleases me, as a father of daughters.  Randi and Tori both come from shooting families.  Randi rose to prominence in the firearms world when she was about Tori’s age now, shooting three-gun cowboy competition (single action revolvers, and Old West style rifle and shotgun) under the auspices of the Single Action Shooting Society (www.sassnet.com).  There, the young Randi didn’t just beat the other women and the other kids…she beat EVERYBODY, including prime of life males.

It is the almost universal observation of shooting instructors that females more quickly learn to shoot than males.  Some part of it is probably their inherently better fine motor coordination. When a male like football player Roosevelt Grier learns to knit, it’s national news; women are more or less expected by our culture to take to knitting.  Trigger pulling, like knitting, is a fine motor skill.

Most schoolteachers will tell you that girls focus better than boys. Shooting is a discipline that DEMANDS mental focus.  Women are more flexible than men, supposedly by a factor of 30 degrees in the pelvic axis.  In position rifle shooting, where some downright contortion-like postures are demanded in, for example, the sitting stage, the overall national champion is often a female.

Congrats to Randi and Tori, and indeed, to all who competed at the Indoor Winter Nationals hosted by Smith & Wesson at their facility in Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s always a well run match, and a challenging one.

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Started the morning with true romantic spirit, sleeping in and watching “Zombie Apocalypse,” the Ving Rhames one, which turned out to be every bit as unintentionally funny as I’d been told.

High points for hilarity were a tie between the Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a shopping cart, and the zombie tigers.  The latter were kinda matted & ratty, as would befit their undead status, and the Ray Harryhausen-ish movements were about what you’d expect from a critter trying to “walk off” a pretty good case of rigor mortis.

Well, my valentine and I are both Calvin & Hobbes fans, and all we could think was, “Hobbes Twenty Years Later.” “Sooo, Calvin, you thought you could just abandon me at that dump when you went off to college, eh…?”

The live critters of our holiday were more fun, bearing in mind that we’d celebrated Valentine’s Day as a couple the weekend before, at a Glock match ably run by the Central Florida Rifle and Pistol Club in Orlando.  After an absence of prehistoric wildlife, the range pond now appears to have two resident alligators, one of which kept a wary just-above-the-surface eye on the loud doings a short distance away.  My valentine is a self-described “shooter chick,” and we were far from the only couple in attendance.  Nothin’ says redneck romance like volleys of gunfire.  A recovering big city denizen, my sweetie is in her element on the range, and loves living where she can carry.

We finished up the 14^th at Starbucks, dropping two-dollar bills (to commemorate Starbucks’ refusal to knuckle under to anti-Second Amendment advocates boycott, see post here of January 28, 2012).  Thanks to all who did the same.  The barista who served us told us we certainly weren’t the only ones there for The Cause, and our collective presence was appreciated. (Tried their new Blonde Roast, a light, crisp blend for an afternoon cup.)

Guns, ‘gators, and zombie tigers…seemed like a righteous redneck Valentine’s Day to me.Also helped me to understand why I’m the firearms editor at Backwoods Home, and not the romance editor…

“O my Valentine, my love for you is as undying as, uh, this zombie tiger from ‘Zombie Apocalypse,’…”

Photo by Lara Solanki – © Syfy

It ain’t a REAL  redneck Valentine shootin’  match if ya ain’t got a pond ‘gator watching the range balefully… 

Shooter-chick celebrates Valentine’s Day by strafing down six plates right to left with a Glock 30 loaded with .45 hardball.  Notice spent casing from last shot just behind pistol’s slide, muzzle still on target as middle plate is hit. Strong women are the most interesting…

A $2 bill, symbolizing “2A support,” goes into the tip jar at the nearest Starbucks.

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