by Berge Avesian
I just got back from my very first Glock Shooting Sports Foundation (GSSF) competition! It was great and I highly recommend it. My performance on the other hand was not so stellar. Let me preface this with a little background: My EDC is a Sig. I carry Sigs on duty. I’ve gone to competitions with my Sig (and done quite well). I am basically a Sig guy. Now in my safe I have a number of pistols, Glocks among them, but none get so exercised as my Sigs. If I was shooting my Sig 226 today, in competition, I have no doubt I would have put up some formidable numbers but…I wasn’t shooting my Sig.
This GSSF competition
was limited to Glocks only. So I pulled my Glock 22 in .40 cal from the back of my safe, grabbed my pistol bag and extra magazines and headed to the range. In hindsight I should have realized I had a problem the moment I picked up my spare mags; two of them were 10 rounders left over from the 1994 AWB! Are you starting to see how I’ve let this pistol languish? Any way I headed out the competition and honestly didn’t do too bad in the 1st two events. The 3rd and final event was the metal plates. Where the first two events could mask my poor marksmanship thanks to larger targets, the plates meant I’d have to be on target with my sights and missed shots would not go unnoticed. 4 strings of fire, 6 plates each and I only hit 15 with 44 rounds! Now I’ve been shooting for a long time and I am very familiar with all manner of firearms and how to handle them. But that doesn’t mean I’ve spent enough time on all of them to understand their nuances and how they shoot (high, low, right, left?).
When the buzzer beeped and I brought my Glock 22 up to bear on the first plate, I was dead on with my sights! The front and rear sight were in near perfect alignment. I squeezed the trigger. Bang! The plate remained unmoved. Follow up shots all had proper sight alignment yet all but the last in that magazine failed to find its mark! What happened?! It took me 2 magazines to figure out the front sight on my Glock is a bit low and every one of my missed shots hit exactly below the steel plate. D’oh! Needless to say I caught on to my sights too late to salvage the heat. If I had just given my Glock as much attention as my Sig I might have figured the sights out and shot a much better score.
Don’t let this happen to you. Whether you are like me and have a bunch of guns or just have one or two, you need to practice with everything you have. Try to run every gun you have enough that you become intimately familiar with its fit and function. Don’t wait till competition or worse a life or death situation to realize you should have been training with your guns more!
Happy Hunting!
Berge Avesian