Authors: Dan Baum
“I’m
so
happy Jeremy’s switched over to the Benelli,” she said in the same breathless veranda drawl other Southern women use to discuss their drapes. “In his last match, he was having jams, and I said, ‘That thing is a boat anchor, honey; you need to get rid of it.’ ”
“What are you shooting?” I asked her.
“Look over there in the rack. You can tell mine.” She walked me over, and it was like approaching an Army gun rack while high on LSD. All the rifles were recognizably AR-15s, but each was wildly distorted by swooping grips, stocks, and free-float tubes and decked out in colors the Lord never intended weapons to be—yellow, teal, scarlet. Marcey’s was actually one of the plainest—all black but for the telltale feminine swirl of makeup on the stock. I got down close. It smelled like a girl’s gun.
The range officer called us to order and explained the stage in the faux-military manner often adopted around guns, presumably on the
assumption that unless one used a tone stern enough to make men’s testicles retract, they’d devolve into twelve-year-old boys. “Shooters will start out with pistol and shotgun fully loaded, chambers empty! Shotgun leaning against this here stump and pistol holstered!” And so on. The rifle was to be positioned downrange, to be picked up after all the pistol and shotgun targets were hit. Shotgun, pistol, rifle: the holy trinity of three-gun.
Jeremy went first. After an intricate ceremony of loading and safing his guns, holstering the pistol, and leaning the shotgun just so, he stood, rotated his shoulders and neck like a boxer in the ring, and nodded at the range officer. Another man raised his arm toward the back of Jeremy’s head; for a second it looked as if he was going to execute him. But it was a timer he held, not a pistol. The timer beeped, and Jeremy snapped into motion.
He snatched the shotgun from the stump and blasted left and right.
Blam! Blam!
The targets, clay pigeons held in wire frames, shattered satisfyingly. Marcey and I walked along behind him as he advanced down the clearing, wasting not a millimeter of motion. He swiveled on his hips as he walked, left
blam
! right
blam
! left
blam
! right
blam
! He hit every target, but really, I thought, shotguns are made for hitting running or flying things, not stationary targets twenty-five feet away, so how hard was it? The second I asked myself the question, Jeremy answered it: The shotgun part of the contest was less about shooting than gun handling—specifically, how fast a competitor could reload. After eight shots, Jeremy’s left hand zipped between his belt and the belly of the gun faster than I could follow it; it looked as if the gun was sucking up shells.
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!
He finished with the shotgun targets, plunged the hot gun muzzle-down into the blue barrel, and unhooked the pistol from his belt in one fluid motion. Both arms straight out, pivoting left and right, he nailed every steel target with a satisfying
plink!
as his legs carried him forward, smooth and precise as an icon in a video game. “If you miss one, that’s a penalty,” Marcey said in my ear. “If you forget to shoot at one completely, that’s a bigger one.”
Jeremy plinked the last of twenty-one pistol targets, cleared his pistol, set it in a wooden box, and swung the rifle from where it lay up into shooting position. Another reason for mixing in the shotgun, I realized: His hands had to shed the muscle memory of the other long gun and adapt instantly to this one. Jeremy crisply put a bullet through each of the rifle targets—stylized squared-off silhouettes, made of brown cardboard and
spread through the tall grass like a platoon of robots waiting in ambush. He ejected his magazine, wrenched open the rifle’s action, and yelled, “Clear!”—a three-gun rock star.
Soldier of Fortune
, the magazine for mercenaries and mercenary wannabes, is said to have held the first formal three-gun competition in the 1980s. To shooters who’d been taught to stand as still as possible and concentrate on a single target, running and gunning was a revelation. By the time I was watching it, the sport had branched formally into three-gun, subgun, and two different categories of practical pistol shooting (involving such arcane conventions as whether, in reloading, an empty magazine had to be returned to a pocket or could be dropped). There were also the historical categories of Cowboy Action Shooting—basically three-gun played with period guns and Western costume—and Zoot Shooting, which called for participants to dress in spats and fedoras or flapper dresses and wield the 1920s-vintage Colts, sawed-offs, and tommy guns that John Dillinger might have used. I’d tried a little practical pistol shooting in Boulder—with my first concealed-carry range officer, the anesthesiologist. We did things like open a door with one hand and shoot with the other while passing through, snatching up a gun from a desk and shooting while seated, and scooting from station to station while felling steel targets and reloading on the run. It was a lot of fun—so much so, in fact, that I found it pretty hard to go back to standing still in a lane, popping off at a single target.
Running and gunning was a marksmanship sport, no doubt about that. But there was no denying that it was also practice for joining the military, a SWAT team, or an end-of-the-world gang with Mel Gibson. “What’s this all about,
really?
” I asked Marcey and Jeremy the next morning at breakfast in the lodge. “Is it a sport, or are you practicing to kill people?”
“We don’t have any
thoughts
of killing,” Marcey said, digging to the bottom of a plate piled with eggs, grits, and country ham. “It’s a sport, like tennis or golf. That’s why we call them ‘guns.’ We don’t call them ‘weapons.’ ”
I was pretty sure that the U.S. Army shooting team competing against Marcey and Jeremy, in their matching yellow Go Army jerseys, saw their guns as weapons. Ditto the many cops and deputy sheriffs
who attended—some at their departments’ expense—to polish combat-shooting skills.
“What we do out on the course would get you killed in a gunfight,” Jeremy said, concentrating on his iPhone, on which he seemed to be doing calculations.
“What do you mean?”
He looked up. “We’re not doing any of the things you do in a gunfight. We’re not assessing threats and engaging them in order. We’re not finding cover. We’re not shouting commands.”
“Or running away,” said a voice on my other side, “which is the best thing you can do in a gunfight.” I turned, and a stocky man with a craggy, copper-colored face put out a hand like a catcher’s mitt, introducing himself as Clark Kennedy. “Any time you’re practicing speed and accuracy, it’s going to help you if something real happens,” he said. “But hell, out here we’re dropping mags! You don’t do that in a gunfight in the military, because ammunition isn’t issued in magazines! You’re going to
need
those puppies.” He leaned across me and asked Jeremy, “What you coming up with?”
Still poking at his iPhone, Jeremy said, “I think I’m going to hold two feet high and two feet left.”
He was figuring out how to make the longest shot of the day—a 560-yarder coming up at Stage 3—using an app called Ballistic: Field Tactical Edition ($19.99). He rotated the phone so I could see what he was doing. “I put in the characteristics of my ammo, plus wind speed, wind direction, wind angle, relative humidity, our altitude here, and upwind velocity. What this is telling me is to hold two feet high and two feet left.”
“You really think you’re going to hit a target at 560 yards?” I asked. Jeremy and Clark both laughed.
“That ain’t far. Clark and I shoot sniper matches out to two thousand yards.”
“You guys are snipers?”
“No. We shoot
sniper matches
. Super long-range.”
“Two thousand yards is more than a mile,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Clark said, his smile crinkling up his face like an Indian chief’s. Jeremy gestured at his iPhone.
“Shooting that far, you also got to punch in spin drift and Coriolis.”
“Which are?”
“If your bullet spins clockwise, spin drift will carry it off to the right some. At 2,200 yards, spin drift can take you off three feet at target. Coriolis is the rotation of the earth.”
“Get out of here.”
“Real long shots, you got to figure it in, because by the time your bullet reaches the target, the earth will have moved some.”
They told me the story of Corporal Craig Harrison, a British sniper who in November 2010 killed two Taliban fighters with two consecutive shots at a mile and a half. Clark said, “He was using the Accuracy International L115A3 in .338 Lapua”—a high-tech rifle that looks like a deck gun from a Klingon battle cruiser. “He did all his calculations and aimed six feet high and two feet to the left.”
“The bullet took two and a half seconds to arrive,” Jeremy said. “In that much time, the earth moved enough to affect the shot. If he hadn’t figured in Coriolis, he’d have missed.”
“So what’s with all this
sniper
business?” I asked, remembering those
GOD BLESS OUR SNIPERS
bumper stickers. “Pretty hard to say your sport isn’t about killing if you’re going to call them ‘sniper matches.’ ”
“It’s just a name,” Clark said. He sat back in his chair and peered down his nose at me. “But what you got against snipers?”
“Well, it’s one thing to face an enemy in battle and another to hide and pick people off at safe distance.” I was old enough to remember Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman, and
Life
magazine’s chilling photo renderings of what they saw through their telescopic sights.
“Which would you rather?” Clark asked. “Put a missile into a building and kill a bunch of kids along with your bad guy? Or send in a sniper to shoot one bullet? A sniper gets the guy that needs killing and doesn’t touch anybody else. If you don’t like collateral damage, you got to love your snipers.”
My mind drifted to the second of those two Taliban fighters. What must he have been thinking when his friend slumped over—and two seconds later, when the sound of the shot arrived? Or was he dead by the time the sound of the first shot arrived? “It must be terrifying,” I said, “to have a bullet come out of nowhere.”
“That’s the whole idea,” Clark said. “One sniper shot can wreck the morale of a whole company—of a whole division. You want the enemy scared, not knowing where it’s safe to stand, not knowing when the next bullet’s coming in.”
“Imagine, though,” I said, “looking through the scope and seeing the face of the man you’re going to kill.”
“That’s not the worst thing,” Clark said. “The worst thing is lying in your own shit for five days waiting for the shot.”
Jeremy and Marcey shot five stages that day. Some required only two guns—pistol and shotgun, say, or rifle and pistol—and some all three. One diabolical stage called on shooters to hunt down and blast shotgun targets hiding in tall brush, then hit a rifle target rotating on a big wheel; another had them move through and around an old cinder-block building while shooting pistol targets, like cops in a hostage situation. Most of the shooters were men, but several squads had at least one woman, including a skinny sixteen-year-old girl being coached by her dad. She was awesome—lithe, quick, and coolheaded; not a girl to mess with. Her dad, a big, solid guy who asked me not to interview or identify her, said he couldn’t think of a better way than three-gun to get a girl through her teenage years. “You got to take and put so much discipline into this, you can’t be thinking of getting into trouble,” he said. “She’s got friends drinking, and messing around, and she’s not into any of that. After school and weekends, she’s on the range with me, with her mind focused.”
One of Marcey and Jeremy’s squad-mates was a bearded young man named Hendrik, who’d come from Sweden to compete. Tall and handsome, he wore a vest so encrusted with shotgun shells that he looked like a suicide bomber. Speaking in English more grammatical and less accented than that of most people at the meet, he told me it was hard getting three-gun off the ground in Europe because of restrictions on guns and ammunition. “You are very lucky here,” he said. It was unfortunate, he added, that the FAA limited passengers to only eleven pounds of ammunition in their checked luggage. Eleven pounds would barely get a man through one stage. Like everybody else who’d flown to the match, he’d shipped his ammo ahead of time.
We stood and watched Stage 7. “Running and gunning” was overstating it slightly; a shooter had to run only a couple hundred yards, and not fast enough to break a sweat. Because Hendrik was the image of sculpted youth, I suggested creating three-gun for real athletes. “You know, where you run a mile and scale a cliff with your guns on your back, and
then
start shooting.”
“There wouldn’t be enough people to support it,” he said. “Look at these guys. They’re not the top athletes. What they do well is shoot. I know a range where guys use golf carts to get from the hundred- to the three-hundred-yard bay. They put their guns on the hooks for the golf clubs. Those guys aren’t going to climb a cliff before shooting, and the guys who can climb cliffs aren’t good shots, so it wouldn’t be fun for them.”
On Stage 3, Jeremy hit the 560-yard target on the first shot, somehow flinging a sixty-four-grain piece of metal—not much bigger than a grain of rice—a third of a mile, in a crosswind, to the exact spot he intended. I’m sure all the math he did helped, but that shot also involved a hefty dose of juju—knowing in your bones where your bullet is going to go and then willing it to the target. Jeremy had juju. Marcey, on the other hand, was disgusted with herself all day. She kept scolding herself as she shot her way through the stages—“You’re no
good
,” “Calm
down
,” “Come
on
, girl”—while Jeremy walked along behind her, muttering, “Run your mouth less and shoot the gun.”
That evening, I sat for a while in a folding chair in front of the hotel with two guys from Maryland.
“I’m thinking of taking four clicks of elevation out of it.”
“You’re an inch and a half high at fifty, ’cause you’re zeroed to two hundred.”