Target Sports

EVENT REPORT: RENEGADES OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Created on 14th May 2009

GWYN ROBERTS reports from a three-gun shoot in the States with bags of fun and a few surprises

THREE-GUN shooting in the US usually means big entries, big sponsorship, big stages, big round count and big fun. This year's MGM Ironman, held at the Parma Rod and Gun Club range in western Idaho, was all of that and more - lots more! Mike Gibson Manufacturing specialises in making all sorts of reactive steel targets, shoot houses, rappel towers and similar for the government, military and law enforcement agencies as well as for us normal folk, and has been fine-tuning this match for the last 10 years now. I first met Mike over in Colorado last year when I went to my first American Handgunner World Shoot-Off Championships and it was there that he told me about his annual ‘renegade' three-gun match. This term is generally used for shooting matches that don't conform to the usual run-of-the-mill USPSA (United States Practical Shooting Association) rule book, but this is exactly the reason why the 148 people who entered the match come to shoot it in the first place! Mike has been the Ironman Match Director for the last nine years but this year, due to Mike's ever-increasing work commitments, his son Travis took over the reins and did an equally impressive job.

Mike very kindly offered to loan me all the guns I would need to shoot the match with, but I decided to travel over just to help out with the range duties. Although I'm familiar with all the guns and courses of fire that we shoot with at home and in Germany, I am certainly not an IPSC shooter and, looking at some of the target arrays, I really wasn't sure which targets should be engaged with which gun. I thought that maybe just shooting at everything I saw with a 5.56mm semi-auto rifle may not be one of my brightest ideas, so I decided that I would watch everybody else do it this time, then definitely go for it if I ever get the opportunity again. It was also in the back of my mind that once I had a nice shiny AR15 and STI pistol in my hands to play with, I may have forgotten to stop at the end of a stage and kept running all the way to Oregon or Washington, just so that I didn't have to give them back for a while!

The Ironman consists of 11 stages, with the competitors shooting it over three days (Thursday 12 - Saturday 14 June), and it was hoped the ROs would be able to shoot all of their stages sometime between the Monday afternoon and Wednesday night. This didn't happen, due to the sheer amount of work and fine tuning that was needed to make sure everything was just perfect for Match day. This meant that although they had been on the range for up to 15 hours each day, a lot of ROs still had to squeeze their last remaining stages in between competitors on the Friday and Saturday. It's not the best way to shoot your match but it was the only way - just as it is at Bisley and everywhere else back home! The difference is it's never 100º on our ranges. To make sure we kept hydrated in Idaho Blackhawk supplied every RO with one of its excellent Hydro packs. ESS also provided us with shooting glasses to keep the dust and empty cases out of our eyes.

Just to finish this match would need an absolute minimum of 1,000 rounds of various types and calibres of ammunition, and that's with no misses on any stage. However, as soon as most of the shooters heard the timer beep this round count went out of the window, as they enthusiastically tried to hit nearly every single target far quicker than was humanly possible, with obvious results! Surely everyone would be able to stick to their ‘one shot, one hit' strategy to shoot a good match? Obviously not - and neither would I if I owned half of the guns that these guys are legally able to use!

There are 10 categories in the Ironman, which are divided up into A, B, C, and D classes in Heavy Rifle (.308 and up), Lady, Junior, Law Enforcement, Limited (iron sights only), Military, Open (anything goes, literally, including a Tom Tom if you like), Senior, Tactical (only one open class gun can be used) and finally the Trooper class. The deranged individuals in the Trooper class must walk (or run) and carry all their gear and weapons, including every last round of ammunition they will need for the entire day's shooting, everywhere they go, all of the time. Er... this isn't the class for me! I'd put all my stuff in the back of a truck or quad and drive around like everyone else did. It's a big range.

Every stage required at least three different types of guns to be used, while some competitors opted to use additional specialised guns on some of the longer range stages. Stage one was a big field course with some hard rifle targets out to around 300yd, as well as some closer paper and steel ones you had to engage through an aperture plate. It also had plenty of shotgun poppers that threw up double clay targets once the steel had hit the floor. Stage two offered a challenging course of fire which had you engaging all the targets from a 12ft-wide gantry suspended by wire, which obviously moved as soon as you tried to walk on it. The course of fire made sure you always had to use alternate sides in order to engage each group of targets, which made it a pretty hard stage to score well on. On stage three you started off on top of a 20ft tower, from which you had to engage various rifle steels. You then dropped down a near-vertical slide to engage more steels set out at 500-600yd-plus, before finishing off with some pistol targets from another suspended platform and some shotgun speed steels and clays. Stage four (a) began with some close IPSC pistol targets before having to hit some ‘skinny sammys' with your rifle, and finished with 20 DTL clays thrown from a trap, which you had to release yourself by pressing a button first. On four (b) you started off by having to climb a 30ft tower to meet a really nice guy called Ty Mabry. He then attached you to a 300ft long zip line on which you'd then impersonate a flying bat while trying to engage a dozen or more IPSC targets at ground level, along with a Bianchi-sized plate rack thrown in for good measure. They should rename it the Crazyman for next year!

Stage five was a shoot house section with some complicated layouts and hard-to-hit fast steels and paper. Stage six added a fully auto Thompson .45 and 9mm MP5 to use along with your own three guns, which certainly produced a lot of broad smiles on the day. It made me chuckle when Andy Fink, a cowboy shooter, actually lined up 13 guns on this stage, but it tickled me even more to watch him having to use an MP5. Tactical cover had to be used on stage seven to neutralise all threats before you could then go forwards and engage the rest of the field course. This was so you could then rescue and carry back your very heavy buddy - aptly named ‘dummy' for being downrange in the first place, apparently, but personally I would have just left him there and found a new friend as the weather was far too hot to be running around in. For those whose legs were starting to get tired there was less physical movement on stage eight as they very kindly supplied you with your own transport, complete with chauffeur. It was an old pickup, and you had to stand in the back while it embarked on three circular laps where you engaged all sorts of targets using a different gun on each rotation, before you were taken up over the hill to engage the final longer distance targets. On stage nine you got to drive yourself, in your very own golf cart, along a zig-zag road with targets strewn down both sides of the range, before reaching a grand finale at the bottom.

Stage 10 was where I was helping out and was the only ‘surprise' section of the match, as it was sealed off with tarpaulins and barricades from prying eyes or gamers until they knocked down the breaching door with a ram and saw what they had let themselves in for. The range varied from large open spaces to narrower twisting gullies and included swingers; bobbers; plate racks; numerous pistol and slug steels; a duelling rifle tree; plenty of no shoots; suspended clays and more large poppers which threw up clays. Some of these targets definitely caught out a few people, who unwittingly engaged the big piece of steel using their pistols. The new MGM ‘attack' target woke a few people up who didn't quite grasp the concept that you should shoot and retreat at the same time if a target is travelling towards you on rails and at a great speed. I'm sure the bright ones will get it right next time though, and not get hit a second time by the target frame! The end section of this stage also included a ‘minefield' which was set out with hundreds of clays that carried a 10-second penalty for each one that was broken by those who decided to look with their feet instead of their eyes. I did try to get Travis to throw in a knife and some real mines just for fun (which you can probably own over here anyway), but he kept going on about something to do with liability issues so in the end I gave up, although I'm sure he thought it was a good idea too! This was also one of the stages where in some parts the general 180º rule of engagement became more like 270º due to the placement of some of the more ‘sneaky' targets and general range topography, but it still remained both safe and extremely good fun - once you had finished shooting it, that is. Due to the number of targets and size of our stage this was one of the few sections that had a maximum par time of 480 seconds as opposed to the usual 400 seconds of the other stages, and yet still only around 10% managed to get to the very end. Despite being told the absolute minimum amount of ammunition needed for each gun, and to then at least double it just to be on the safe side, some people still didn't seem to want to listen! On many occasions this quickly lead to some frantic activity by both ROs and other competitors as they tried desperately to resupply the shooters who had completely run their guns dry half way down the course.

Amusing for us at the time, but not for them as the ‘I told you sos' started to ring out. Finally, stage 11 was the bunker stage that ended up as a jungle run up the side of a hill. Technically it wasn't that hard to hit the targets while shooting from inside the bunker. It was, however, much harder once you had to climb out of it and run like a goat engaging everything you saw for the next 100yd or so - some people were hardly able to breathe once they got to the end of it. I'm just glad I wasn't helping out on this one!

On several occasions and on different stages throughout the match, I heard both shooters and ROs calling out for help as competitors' guns were either falling to pieces or they were simply running out of magazines, having stuffed all they could into their belts and pockets prior to starting the stage. It was usually less than 10 or 15 seconds before competitors standing nearby came to the rescue and replaced the items on the move. Like I said earlier, this is a ‘renegade' match, and while there is good humoured rivalry between all of the competitors, there is also a strong bond between them, leaving no-one short of help whenever they need it most, whatever the problem. Just as a top match should be! When the last of the 200,000-plus rounds had been put safely down -range and the dust had started to settle, it was time to leave the stats people alone to finish off doing their thing. During this time everyone chipped in and helped to dismantle the ranges as much as possible, which was a big, big help, but it still took us another three days or so to finish off bringing everything back to the MGM workshop. Once everything had been finalised and the scores checked, it wasn't much of a surprise that the overall winner of the 2008 Ironman was world class three-gunner Matt Burkett from Arizona. For those who don't know him, Matt has pretty much won every major title around the world in three-gun competition and has won the Ironman for the last six or seven years in a row now. In second place was Scoped class shooter Dave Neth, a local guy who is also a top class three-gun performer in the States; also shooting Scoped was third-placed Bennie Cooley, who's been a top-ranked pistol and shotgun shooter for many years now. John Bagakis, shooting in the Limited class (only one scope allowed), shot an excellent match to win his class and take fourth overall. There were plenty of gun prizes flying around which were won either by good shooting or by drawing tickets out of a hat. Either way it was well worth it, and all of the ROs were presented with a specially engraved Ironman Spyderco knife for their efforts. Thank you!

Once again I have met and made even more good friends from over the pond, and was inundated with offers to use guns and anything else that I needed to shoot the match with. You will not meet a nicer bunch of people, who are more than willing to help out fellow shooters from the UK. If you are maybe thinking of taking the plunge and travelling over to shoot some proper competitions for a change all you have to do is ask - I'm sure you won't be disappointed!