SPEAKERS

Jim Shepherd, QA Outdoors

Cole McCullough NRA Director of Competitive Shooting

Tom Yost, NRA Competitions Specialist

Cole McCullough

The last time that we ran it was in 2019. Right before COVID. When COVID Hit in 2020, that was it for everything.

The question became, you know, at what point can it come back? And there were a lot of other issues. We just weren’t able to do it.

The NRA moved its competitive shooting headquarters here to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, which is a National Guard base of just the absolute highest level. So it took us a couple of years just to kind of get everything under the circumstances in place.

Now we've had a chance to decide how we would run that sort of event here. We've got a great scheme for it, it's going to be pretty big.

We've got a title sponsor, Walther has come on for the next two years to be the title sponsor.

We've got an enormous amount of industry support. And the other part of the NRA, they handle all of the sponsorship stuff. Because this match runs on the sponsored guns. All of the competitors shoot those sponsored guns; all different kinds just like it was before.

It will be 12 stages of fire, all of competitive shooting sports, different kinds; just like it was before, we're going to take the same format.

There'll be an amateur division and a Pro Division.

And in addition, this year, we're going to have nine side matches.

So you'll come in and you'll shoot four stages per day for three days. And you’ll shoot three side matches per day.

That means you'd be shooting seven stages a day. Then, on the last day, we’ll have the banquet and then will give out a quarter million dollars wroth of prizes and cash and all that sort of thing.

Tom Yost

Right, this is quite different. I mean, the World Shooting Championship is a very different animal. So the way that we it's really pretty ingenious. We will have 24 squads overall. And there will be AM and PM squadding. Each day, you’ll shoot either in the AM section or the PM section -and you’ll shoot four stages a day. So instead of having the mornings or afternoons off, you’ll shoot three of the side matches instead. And everything runs about an hour or so per stage.

So you have full days with us. Just the amount of ammo that you’ll shoot will be a lot.

Tom Yost

What you’ll pay is an entry fee. And it would cost more than that to buy enough ammo. But the guns are supplied; the ammo is supplied. All you need to do is show up with eyes, ears and a smile and have a good time.

Cole McCullough

When we designed the match, the question was: “how do you determine who the world's greatest shooter?”

You can imagine the debates that took take place on that. But what it has to do…whatever it is..is be measurable. It has to be reasonably measurable. So what we thought is, you know, if you take any shooting sport discipline, any any legitimate shooting sport discipline, to be really great at it is a lifetime of commitment. People don’t understand that -and history is littered with people who have that opinion.

They soon find out that at the world's shooting championship, you're faced with 12 different stages of competitive shooting.

To be a rifleman, you have to be able to shoot the rifle. But what does that mean?

Well, bull's eye rifle, you have to be able to do that, whether it's high power or small bore. That’s a real skill. But you have to be able to move and you have to be able to shoot an AR -and not just static and on a bullseye line, you should be able to shoot and move at the same time, and that’s the action shooting sports.

We also felt that you needed to be able to have the same types of skills for handgun, and the same types of skills for shotgun. And you also had to have a multi gun discipline, the multi gun skill.

So when we look at that we took 12 stages of fire, and initially they were, they were handgun, rifle, shotgun and multi gun.

We kept that format for the first few years. We worked the bugs out of the match about what types of rifles you could shoot, types of stages, how many rounds, how long it would take. In the end, we've got those same types of stages here today.

So we will see, without being able to look at the actual list of everything, you're gonna see a PRS stage, and you're gonna see multi-gun stage, you're gonna see a cowboy action stage, you're gonna shoot sporting clays, right, you're gonna shoot by Bullseye pistol, NRA precision pistol, right, PCC, you're gonna be shooting USPSA, right, you've got to be able to take the test to really take a broad measure of skill. So there are people that are really specialists -in one area. They can’t really shoot a handgun for speed, or a shotgun well at wing shooting, sporting clays, you know, that’s going to expose you.

But still have the ability to bring those people in. We’re enticing them -so if you win the stage and you’re in the Pro Division, you can win $1,000 per stage -plus prizes.

So we reward and incentivize people, even if they’re not really a great shooter in some of these disciplines.

If you come in and you shoot well, in any of the given disciplines -and you win- you walk away with $1000 dollars, plus your on the prize table. That’s the pros, amateurs cannot win cash, but they can still win prizes. And the prizes are deep. I think the last World Shoot had 200 competitors win a gun. And some chose optics -and we’re going to have high level optics coming off these rifles. In some case, the optics, spotting scopes, everything goes on the prize tables. So the enormous amount of sponsor driven pries that go into this are like nothing else.

I'm really glad to see that because those types of prize tables have gone away in the last several years

So if you have to guesstimate what would you ballpark say is on the price table?

Tom Yost

I mean, $25,000 cash to the winner. That’s BIG.

Tom Yost

And Lena’s dad…you can’t forget Jerry Miculek

Cole McCullough

There was a discussion of that in the past. We didn’t do it, just kept it pro and amateur. But it looks lie we’re going to begin to have those different types of groupings in there.

The other the other thing I'll say just to that is one of the stories that may go unnoticed in competitive shooting and so that there's a guy by the name of Greg Jordan. Greg's the only the only person who's won the World shooting team championship - twice. He almost wanted a third time.

There was a unique circumstance in year three of the world shooting championship where the former general operations director made a rule that a professional could bring his own guns in and compete against the stock guns.

As you know different different pros have significant real issues about being able to compete in the match, because in those scenarios, you're going to be shooting on everybody's guns. Some can; some can't. Doug Koenig won that year, and it was great.

But Greg Jordan was shooting on stock guns and almost beat him. He came in second.

So Greg won it twice. And he came in second one time, using stock guns against the open guns that were brought in that one year only.

But this year, there is no ability to bring your own guns in. And so we've talked about that.

And we're actually going to have a small private committee selected by pros and people that we want to speak to. And we're going to discuss having an Open category in the world shooting championship, not in 2024, but in 2025.

So there may be another category where we'll allow certain groups of professionals to bring their own guns and shoot in the match. And they'll run those guns on the stages as a separate division.

So we are open to that. But the idea is: how do you really determine who the world's best shooter?

We had to take away all of the little custom “tricks” that people have on guns. To take a wide measure of their skill across the shooting sports. If everything is weighted the same in the scoring, then you can take that test. It’s really proved to work. It's imperfect in some ways.

But if anybody's got any better ideas, I'm all ears to what they may be.

Cole McCullough

It's going to be April the fourth through the sixth, 2024, at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. The registration will open on December 6. And you can get to the website by going to wsc.nra.org -we have our own website. The registration will open precisely on December the sixth -a certain time it or will be listed on there. You want to make sure because his fills up pretty quickly. It's been full every year that we've done it - including the first year.

Tom Yost

So you came out for the first year and fired, didn’t you?

Cole McCullough

A good good question. Just south of Indianapolis. About a half an hour south - not even - of Indianapolis. So you fly right into Indianapolis Airport, which by the way is ranked the number one airport in the country for 10 years. So the travel in and out of the place is great.

When you go to Camp Atterbury, you go on the actual base, which is nice. And it's enormous. I mean, they have probably 70- 80 ranges on the base. And we’re going to occupy every bit of maybe 15, or 20. Some of the ranges are so big, we have a couple stages on the same site.

Like I said, we have 21 courses of fire, we'll have probably about 100 Match staff.

And by the way, people can go onto that website. And they can begin to apply for being match staff. We’ll try to match their qualifications and determine if they have the abilities to do some of the things that are needed for that.

But listen to this deal for the match staff: we have our own separate prize table, almost $50,000 on the prize table just for match staff. And we cover all their food and lodging, they work on the match and they get to shoot it. In their own division two or three days prior to the match actually opening.

That gives us a chance to test all the stages in the matches - by actually shooting it. We know that in order to do this, we have to have the sponsors there - and they can contribute. But they want to talk to customers, they want to do things, so we need professional staff with experience in the disciplines that can cope with the realities of everything. So the staff itself is is pretty big deal in itself.

Cole McCullough

We've done that every year of the of the match. I’m stunned some manufacturers have not seized on the story of the World Shoot, to show what their firearms do and how they perform over the course of time.

And we've, you know, we've adjusted some of the stages. So for example, if we, in the first year, we had precision pistol stage, and precision pistol has a rapid fire stage to it. And that rapid fire stage, we found that all of a sudden, sometimes the 1911s would hang up. The question was, why are they hanging up? Were people were making them hang up -because they're not very good bullseye shooters, and they don't want the low score. Or was it just because you know, over time, 1911s are prone to that?

So what we did is said was ..we don't need a rapid fire stage. All we want to be able to do is put a target out there at 25 yards. We use 25 yards because if it's a stock 1911, the X ring needs to be able to reflect what the gun can handle. We can't give you a target that the gun can't handle. So we modify some rules.

And we say, okay, fine, you get three sighter shots. That way you get used to it, feel it. Then…here’s 20 rounds, and you have two targets for 10 apiece. Put 20 rounds on them and let's just see if you can hit what you're aiming at. And that's the test. And it’s pretty hard. I get that.

Tom Yost

Right, in IDPA we call that a “failure to do right”.

Cole McCullough

We've learned the lesson. And other times we added a certain penalty. So if a shooter did not get a hit on a target, they would be charged like a 10 second penalty or what have you.

We we make that so that those penalties for not engaging were so rough that somebody wouldn’t not want to engage. It’ll just ruin the stage. But they weren't in the beginning. We didn't have it all figured out. If you just dumped the rounds instead of engaging the target, you were getting a better score. So we we've learned a lot of lessons to adjust that.

We're gonna have some other discussions, we've got some suggestions about how these guns are set up. You know, some people feel that they're not set up in the same way that maybe they should be.

But our challenge is, how do you set the guns that are ready for amateurs and the best shooters in the world and test them both?

How do you design stages to do that and keep it safe and do that?

So we're in year seven now. We've worked out a lot. The big thing is we're moving to this big military base to do it.

Cole McCullough

There's certain stages - even on the 12 gauges -when on the sporting clays stage, we have like a pattern board and everybody gets two or three shots on the pattern board.

We're trying to do a design here that’s not a lot of physical running and stuff. It's a shooting contest, not an athletic contest.

So movement’s to a minimum.

I would almost say this is Disney for the shooting sports, but I’m not a big fan of Disney to be honest with you, you know?

Cole McCullough

It's all grass, and  it's beautiful. One of the things I want to do is personally invite you to come out here and stay on base with us. Get the flavor of the whole thing, interact with the people at night. It’s going to be an awesome event.

Cole McCullough

I don't know if it'll be open by then they're actually redoing all those types of spaces.

• Jason Price (GSCO), W. Laird Hamberlin (SCI)
• Brian Lynn, Sportsmen’s Alliance
• Kai Kloepfer, CEO/Founder Biofire Technologies
• Doug Ritter, Knife Rights
• Knox Williams, American Suppressor Association (ASA)
• Tim Joseph, VP Marketing, Benelli USA
• Ken Campbell, CEO, Gunsite Academy
• Chris Dorsey
• Alan Gottlieb/SAF & CCRKBA
• Scent of Success -- Sam Burgess/Wildlife Research Center
• Bill Wilson: Wilson Combat
• Q&A With Jonathan Shults, Co-Founder/CEO SilencerCo.
• Joe Bartozzi: President/CEO National Shooting Sports Foundation
• Jared Smith: Taking Over AMMO, Inc.
• Robert Nioa: Coming to America