If you're losing the game, change the rules.

I read this story over at Guffaw in AZ and it got me thinking about one of my favorite shooting match stories.

I was never a world-class shooter, but I did used to shoot a very great deal more than I do now and I really enjoyed combat and hunter-pistol matches. The club in the little Texas panhandle town where I lived had a series of monthly pistol matches and I was generally there. None of us were big-time competitors, it was just for fun and practice. All the regulars knew each other.

There were three local cops who used to come to the combat matches, one of them regularly. He was pretty good, too, though he never finished in the money. The other two were frankly pitiful. Then one month none of the cops showed up. The next month, none of the cops showed up. We wondered about this, and dispatched one of our number to ask one of the cops why. They were perfectly welcome to compete, it wasn't like anybody (Well, I did, but I kept it to myself) wanted them to go away. The answer that came back was kind of ominous - "You'll find out." It seems that the three cops stopped coming to our match because they were ordered to. Nobody actually said we were embarrassing the department and the local chief didn't like it, but that was the impression we got.

Around that time the local cops started building their own range on city property. This was redundant, because they'd always had free access to the club's two ranges. When some of us went to see, we were chased off - it was very hush-hush. Shortly after that, the cop who used to compete regularly came to our combat match - not to shoot, but to deliver an invitation. We were invited to form a pistol team and come to their first match. I think it was PPC rules.

We should have studied the rules more carefully. We were cocky as hell, sent our best shooters (I just barely made the team) and we got our clocks cleaned. We showed up with our .45's and stared in bemusement at the heavy-barreled .38's we were competing against. The stage times were really liberal: We were used to shooting each stage as fast as possible because that was part of the scoring, but in this match it was best to take your time. The scoring rings were really, um, small. And the loads they were using were barely more than squibs.

Yeah, we got clobbered.

We got a little of our own back after the match proper, when they set up bowling pin tables. The .38's went back in the shooting boxes and the .45's came out, but now they were competing with people who literally slept with their .45's. Our team took that event 1-2-3. But we weren't anxious to do it again, so I guess they showed us.