September 15, 2004
2004 IDPA Nationals "Impressions and Observations" From Wayne Johnson
Hi All:
John Mercurio and I spent five days in Little Rock Arkansas seeing the sights and experiencing southern hospitality. We shot 18 stages (234 rds.) from Friday AM to Saturday PM.We stayed at the Double Tree Hotel in mid town. The C.A.S.A. range (Central Arkansas Shooting Association) is located about 25 miles NW of Little Rock in beautiful forested hill country. The range is located on thirty acres of land with fourteen bays dug out of the hills and thick woods.
I was surprised that CASA has only 50 members and have only about 20- 30 shooters at their monthly matches. They have a hard working core group that transforms the facility into the once a year extravaganza. It was raining, warm and sticky Friday AM when John had to shoot. It stopped by noon when my squad had to shoot. Shooting targets with plastic over them is somewhat difficult when they are placed closed together.
Saturday was dry but over cast. We both shot with "Alabama Boys". I started saying "y'all" by the end of the two days of shooting with them. John and I have some humorous comments about some of the locals, but they not fit for general publication. Ask us at the match.
328 shooters from all over the world shot 18 stages ranging from "in your face" out to 20 yds. Many of them (45%) were three targets at close range from 2- 7 yds. and very quick. Not much movement, no prone and no steel. Only two stages had movers with one being very very fast and the other very slow. One other had you sitting in a bath tub ("Mr. Bubbles") reading a magazine with three target almost at your toes shooting strong and then weak hand.
Another had you inside a car with five targets surrounding you with your gun on the passenger seat ("Trapped"). FYI: At each stage we lined up, loaded, topped off, shot the stage one by one of course and then lined up again, unloaded, showed clear and went to the next stage and did all over again. This helped the flow of the match, but would not work at our matches due to it being a cold range.
CDP Expert was the largest of all the classes with 34 shooters. Only 15.99 seconds separated 10th to 2nd place (.89 sec. per stage). John finished 6th place and I with 9th place and 2nd place "Veteran". Rob Leatham, David Sevigny, Taran Butler, Ernset Langdon and Jerry Miculek were there and fun to watch. We had the awards banquet at the Arkansas State Fairgrounds with two barbecued hogs for the main course. Can you say "Razorbacks"?
I hope more of us can go next year. See me about the total cost.
Wayne Johnson
MATCH RESULTS: Brad Maynard finished 1st over all by the comfortable margin of almost 4 sec. John Mercurio, in 2nd place, led Adam Carlson in 3rd place.
Wayne Johnson finished in 4th place, Russ Holetz finished 5th, and Mike Grant was in 6th place over all. Carlson, Johnson, Holetz, and Grant finished within a 1.12 sec. spread!
Lowel Moural finished 7th, Jay Mirando finished 8th overall, leading Chad Case, who finished 9th, by less than 1 sec. Brain Gonsalves finished in 10th place overall.
The complete match results can be found on our IDPA web site.
As an aside, please note the size of the superscripted letters in the text above. Their smaller size, as we all know by now, is characteristic of documents produced on a word processor.
A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT: Fellow Members: We have used the "no walk through" format for several months. It seems to shorten the match time considerably.
However, a flaw in this system was found at the last match. On stage # 1, one group of shooters ran straight to the car window and engaged the target without going to the rear of the car and using it for cover as the scenario procedure described. This gave that group an advantage of seeing the target sooner and thus engaging it sooner.
To correct this, I would like each scenario procedure to be READ OUT LOAD when the shooters change to their next scenario and to have the procedure FOLLOWED.
This will solve the misinterpreting, or the "Gaming", of a scenario, which will favor one group over another. When there is doubt about any scenario procedure, check with the match director or scenario designer for clarification. Don’t do it the way you think it should be done because you see an advantage of doing it differently.
Your cooperation would be greatly appreciated.
Your President, Wayne Johnson
A QUIET DISCUSSION OF HEARING PROTECTION: We all know that excessive
noise can damage our hearing. As a result, we require hearing protection for
all shooters and observers. This should be a ‘no brainer.’
Like everything else that we do, we all occasionally fall from grace (with the exception of following the four rules of firearm safety. Especially Rule #1. Right?)
Hearing damage is cumulative. A few rock concerts here, 300 watts of car stereo blasting away there, three weeks on the rifle range shooting an M14, a gas-powered leaf blower at full chat, the continual thump of a stamp mill, a couple of McCulloch MAC 10s at full rev on each side of your head, it all adds up to noise-induced hearing loss. I’m sorry, what did you say?
My point is (you knew that I’d get there) that we need the best hearing protection that we can have.
Most of us use some form of passive or active earmuffs. Others are content with earplugs. Some plugs are of foam, twisted to fit into the ear canal, others can be form-fitted to the individual ear. The later are usually much more effective than ae the foam earplugs.
I’ve run across a presentation describing the effectiveness of hearing protective devices tested on the range using rifle, pistols, and shotguns as impulse noise sources. The findings that seem most important to me are those that many of us already suspect from our own observations.
A short (but quiet) note: Hearing thresholds, noise levels, and noise attenuation are usually measured in dB (decibels, The Bel is named after Alexander Graham Bell). This is a logarithmic scale used to compress the extremely wide range of hearing into a scale that is easier to deal with. At the middle of human hearing frequencies, the ear can detect changes of sound intensity of about 1 dB. Doubling sound power increases sound intensity by 3 dB. Increasing sound power by 10 times increases sound intensity levels by 10 dB. Because sound intensity is a ration, zero dB is always relative to another level of sound intensity. In auditory study, zero dB is usually set at the threshold of ‘normal’ human hearing. This was a level determined in young adults prior to the advent of power amplifiers and rock and roll. For further information, the interested reader might go to http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/dB.html. But, I digress.
Results from a study, “Personal Noise Exposure Assessment from Small Firearms”, by Chuck Kardous, et al., can be seen at the following web site:
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/pubs/presentations/PNE-ASA032.swf.
The results of Kardous. et al. show that:
So, those of you who use both an effective earplug and an effective earmuff are not only justified, but you’re right. You can lord it all over the rest of us. We will briefly tolerate it. Don’t press your luck!
The manufacturers of the HPDs used in the study above were not given in the article. However, in correspondence with Kardous, he reported that the following HPDs were used in their study: Bilsom 556, Bilsom 655, Bilsom 707, Bilsom Targo, David Clark, EAR Classic, EAR Combat Arms, EAR HiFi, EAR Ultra 9000, ESP, Howard Leight Leightning, North, Tactical 6s&7s, and Howard Leight Thunder. Results from specific products were not made available. Interestingly, Howard Leight sells an active ear muff under the company names that is said to be, “Powered by Pro- Ears.” Pro-Ears, of course, sells their own active earmuffs.
WHICH PISTOL IS FASTEST IN IDPA? This question frequently comes up on discussion both on and off shooting forums, with the nod given to enhanced service pistols. The IDPA division and classification system tries to avoid the possibility that a specific style of pistol makes a marked difference by permitting competition only between like firearms.
To look at a local level of use, I compared the respective divisions of the overall top ten overall finishers in our last four matches. ESP shooters finished 1st overall in two of the matches. SSP and CDP shooters won one match each. Combing the results from the four matches, the top ten finishers include 14 ESP shooters, 18 CDP shooters, and 8 SSP shooters. However, the total combined number of shooters in each division was skewed toward SSP. There were 71 CDP shooters, 64 ESP shooters, and 102 SSP shooters.
Proportionally, of the top ten finishers, 35% shot ESP, 45% shot CDP, and 20% shot SSP. Of the total combined shooters, 24.6% shot ESP, 27.3% shot CDP, and 48.1% shot SSP.
The results above might be interpreted as indicating that CDP and SSP firearms are more competitive than SSP firearms. However, most of the data are replicates; i.e., the same shooters shooting the same firearms on four different occasions. Additional data, taken from different sources with different shooters, might show different results.
It is likely that it isn’t the firearm, it‘s the shooter.
Shoot well and stay safe,
Mike McGinn