Tag: recreational shooting

Bowling Pin Match, Sunday June 12

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After a two-month hiatus for berm work at the Tucson Rifle Club action range, we’re back on! Registration begins at 8:00 AM. Sign in at the range office, but if all you’re going to do is shoot the match, you don’t need to pay the daily use range fee – it’s part of the match entry fee for non-members. $10 for the first gun, $5 each for additional guns. First round downrange (hopefully) by about 8:45.

We’re going to shoot Major (.40S&W and above), Minor (9mm and below), and .22 rimfire as separate classes, in a double-double-elimination contest.  Line up three abreast, whoever wins two rounds takes that set.  Lose two sets, you’re eliminated from that class.

Smallest centerfire allowed: .38 Special. Hollowpoint and flat-point bullets work better at carrying pins off the tables than round-nose or FMJ bullets do, regardless of caliber.

You’ll be paired off against other shooters in your division for head-to-head competition, again, best 2 out of 3 wins the set. Whoever’s left at the end of the match with no more than one loss is the winner for that class. Bring enough ammo! Most tables take well over five shots. Even if you lose the round, you can keep shooting until you’ve cleared your table if you want to. Consider it practice for the next round.

The last match of the day will be a best two-out-of-three competition between the top Major and Minor shooters (unless, of course, it’s the same person). Your only prize: the accolades of your peers.

Everyone who hangs around until the end of the shoot will be put in for a drawing. $1 of each entry goes into a pot. A drawing from the names of those present will be taken, and the winner gets the whole pot.

See you Sunday, June 12!

Now THIS is Interesting

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Breda posted recently about Luckygunner.com‘s use of “gunbunnies” at the recent Bullet Fest event, linking to an interview with Brian Crane.  Completely unrelated to her topic, here’s something I found very interesting:

Brian: I have an arrangement with them which was essentially tied to how the marketing of the business did. That’s going to be off the record what that actual arrangement is. Needless to say, I became one of the co-founders and they said, “Brian, go do our online marketing. Figure this stuff out.”


Andrew: So what’s the first thing that you do, Brian? You come in there, they put all this on your shoulders. What do you do?


Brian: Immediately start reaching out to the bloggers. So in our particular space, you had just a ton of sites that all had really solid back link profiles. I’d say there’s probably at least 100 active bloggers that have page rank five sites where they’re talking about guns. You start reaching out to them and working with them to promote Lucky Gunner through their sites. Holistically from a marketing standpoint, you want to get that community of influencers pushing us to their . . . twofold, to their actual readers but then also linking to us because it was building our back link profile very quickly as well.


I think the tipping point was essentially there was an event called the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous and not to go into a lot of details, but the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous does a raffle where they give away a bunch of stuff as part of this raffle and they were selling tickets online. And they were using PayPal as the channel for selling these tickets. And PayPal came in and said, “This has to do with guns. We’re going to shut you down.” They cut the raffle off in the middle of it. They essentially removed the component of being able to sell the tickets in the middle of this push to do the raffle, and so we stepped in and we were the back end for those raffle ticket sales. And that introduced us also to a much bigger community of these gun bloggers because people were like, “Awesome. You guys are helping out. Screw PayPal. We hate PayPal.” It’s an interesting space just because people are like . . . it’s a very combative stance because the tech companies don’t really get or like firearms.


Andrew: I saw some blog posts about you and with you on that issue. So apparently it was really heated, and you got a lot of attention and as you say a lot of props for coming in and helping out.

According to the interview, Luckygunner.com was in business for two months before he was brought on board. During that two months they were moving merchandise at a rate of about $250k per year. At the end of the year they’d done $3.2 million in sales.

Brilliant marketing move! And I was quite happy about it, myself.  Thanks again, Brian!  I’m glad we were able to help out a new company.

American-Occupied America

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Home again! Flew out of Knoxville this morning at 07:00. I had to check my firearms at the American Airlines counter, and a sweet young Southern Belle was there to ensure that my firearms were unloaded. When I opened the case, all she could see was my AR-15 (the pistols were in a gun rug in the rifle case). Her immediate response?

Oh, that’s COOL!

Very similar to the first time I flew with a firearm.

I love the South.

Oh, and do you want to know how to have your carry-on luggage x-rayed three times? Put a T-shirt compressed into the shape of a (very large) cartridge into it.  When I get a chance, I’ll take a picture of it.

Right now my body is telling me it’s almost 9:00PM, and I’ve got to get up at 05:00 tomorrow.

Bulletfest 2011!

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We’re here!  As we pulled up the hill to park, the “range hot” siren sounded, and all hell broke loose.  Full auto and cannon fire galore.  When we got to the top of the hill we were face-to-face with an M3 M5 Stuart tank and a halftrack with a pintle-mounted M2.  The firing line starts on the left with not one, not two, but three muzzle-loading civil-war era cannon, and proceeds to the right with station after station containing more firpower than I’ve ever personally witnessed, including my trip to the Big Sandy shoot.

Many, many pictures to follow.

Time to get Ready

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Well, my body says it’s 05:00, but that’s when I normally get up.  Breakfast starts in 30 minutes, and then we’re off to the range to start burning through a couple of pallets of ammo!

I love this hobby avocation.

On My Way to Knoxvegas

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I’m sitting in the Tucson airport waiting to board my first flight from here to Dallas.  Blogger was bloggered yesterday, so I couldn’t work in the next uberpost.  That’s going to be a few days, as I expect this weekend to be busy.  I have a camera, though, so I hope I will be posting photos and video of the shoot.

Should be a fun weekend!

It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated

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Brian of LuckyGunner.com emails:

Glad to see that you’re registered for our upcoming Blogger Shoot! I’m looking forward to seeing you again since the last time we saw one another face-to-face at the GBR in Reno. In conjunction with the Shoot, we’re putting together an awards ceremony called The Gunnies for Saturday night at the Shoot and The Smallest Minority has been nominated for a Gunnie Award in the following category:

* Best Gun Blog – Entertainment

Voting is now open for the next 14 days to determine the winners in each of the 9 categories. It’d be pretty cool if you could announce your nomination for The Gunnies on your site.

Consider it done, though I think you’d have a hard time arguing that TSM is an entertainment site.

There are a bunch of other categories and nominees, so if you’re interested in voting, go here.