Plate Match Results.

I may not have covered myself with glory, but abject shame was notably absent, as well; I shot at the center of the group. And given the abilities of the group, I'll take that.

Stop plate matches are great for the shooter who wants to shoot a lot for his entry fee. Typically, they feature five stages of five strings of fire, in which the shooter is expected to, at the buzzer, draw and shoot five steel plates, ending each string by shooting the plate with the red stem holding it up. That's 125 rounds, if you shoot it clean, with a minor demand on your shoot/no-shoot consciousness. I like 'em.

I shot... er, more than the minimum 125 rounds.

I also proved that you don't have to be a freakin' psychic genius to figure out why your gun is malfunctioning; you just have to pay attention to what's going on.

It only took me three stages, encompassing nearly 100 rounds, to figure out that I had a bad magazine. :( Sure, it said "COLT" on the base plate. Sure, it looked fine. But for three strings in a row, that mag caused a misfeed in my Kimber that caused the plating to peel back on the bullet when it struck the face of the chamber. This caused the slide to fail to seat fully. In two stages, I had two failures to seat, in a single string each.

Finally I took notice, and deleted that magazine. Bingo! No Malf. After the match, I loaded that magazine and fired it into the berm. Bingo! It gave the same malfunction.

Eliminate the magazine-- eliminate the problem.

I shoulda been a fair bit higher in the rankings. The match rules allowed for two mechanical "alibis," but I didn't take any-- the Real World (tm) doesn't offer alibis.

Scruit. I'm happy enough to have trained and found a problem, and to have fixed it.

This is why we train.