Target Shooter 1

Super Senior and super pumper George Granycome shooting targets through an
aperture at the start of a stagee
The stage designs were of the snappy,
multiple-position format familiar to pistol shooters,
with lots of high / low apertures and a high proportion
of fast moving bobber-type paper targets activated
by a variety of ingenious but simple mechanisms.
Cunning target placement and numbers meant that
Standard Manual and Auto shooters (who start with
no more than 9 rounds in their guns maximum) had
to carefully consider their loading strategy to take
maximum advantage of timings and position. This
was not “running and gunning” but a choreograph
of optimum load/shoot sequencing, almost always
weighing up opposing strategies in the five short
minutes each squad has to look closely at the stage.
But this is exactly what lends PSG such an edge!
Accuracy and Speed are paramount, but loading
and strategy make the crucial difference to success
and failure on a stage, and indeed on the match.
It means too that slower shooters can win if they
can find sweet spots that others have missed and
perhaps shoot from the weak shoulder with as
much confidence as they can their strong stance.
Reducing the number of shooting positions means
less time, less opportunity for error and thus faster
stage times. Practice! Practice! Practice! is the byword
and in PSG nothing applies more to this dictum than
the need to refine ones’ ability to load on the move.
By the end of the first day’s shooting, all the teams
had either shot or watched the stages being shot
and it was apparent that there were some very fast
and consistent shooters emerging in the Italian,
Serbian and Russian teams. The UK ladies team
was performing well having got into their stride
early and shooting a careful but accurate match.
The loading techniques were the main variance
from country to country. Thailand
shooters had long interchangeable magazine tubes
extending the gun’s length to around five feet long and
holding around 25 standard 12g rounds making
them heavy as well as somewhat unwieldy. The
Germans and many others favoured chest plate rigs
holding cartridges such that the gun could be
inverted and two or four cartridges at a time could be
loaded very fast in a grab-force down motion. Many,
particularly the Serbian modified team used the older
plastic “Prodec” clips and proved particularly adept
at fast loading on the move even though the gun is
taken from the shoulder and inverted to load like this.
The British teams favoured box (or stripper)
loaders with four cartridges grabbed using
the weak hand and loading with the gun still
mounted in the shoulder or dropped slightly to cut sight
acquisition times down between loading and shooting.
The thoughtful stage layouts and squad rotation
ensured a keen momentum as the days progressed.
It would take too long to describe all of the 22
stages, but several do deserve special mention here...
One was a fast slug stage with a line of six IPSC card
targets requiring one hit on each spaced about 2 foot
apart at a distance of around 12 meters. What made
it difficult was the fact that only the two outer targets
were stationary. The four central targets were on fast
moving bobbers (a mechanism like a windscreen
washer arm that has a target mounted on the end).
These were behind a wall of tyres such that they
disappeared at the end of each stroke so you couldn’t
sight on them at rest and had to take the shot while
they were in motion. This was coupled with the
additional problem that each arm also had a no-shoot
target mounted on it as well - so a miss might incur
30 Target Shooter