Standard Mischief

Checking my local NBC broadcaster, I note that on day 8, (Saturday, February 18) there is going to be some over-the-air broadcasting of the coolest shooting sport, the Biathlon. This is quite surprising, as I don’t ever think I’ve caught anything more than a glimpse of coverage before on the idiot box. I wonder if past NRA letter writing campaigns have actually succeeded.

According to Wikipedia, the Biathlon is a sport that combines cross-country skiing with .22 rifle target shooting. It’s particularly challenging because accurate shooting is much harder when your heart is pumping quickly, and I’m sure cross-country skiing does a great job at doing that. No other common shooting sport really gives you an aerobic workout.

Unfortunately, even with our huge, healthy, diverse culture of gun ownership, we usually do extremely poorly in international competition. Why is this? Part of it might be because you really need a lot of specialized equipment. You need snow, skis, and a bolt action rifle. That’s not something I can scrounge up every weekend.

There is an alternative, a sport called ?Summer Biathlon?, but I have a few problems with it. First off, you don’t get to carry your rifle with you. This is probably a safety issue, but I think it can be safely overcome. Second, you are shooting just .22 LR. Third, you are running in circles. Keep this for the beginners, scouts and kids, but I think we can do better.

I envision this as a sport to build us a nation of riflemen (riflepeoples, whatever). People turn to sports as a means of fun fitness, and IMHO there are few sports as fun as making the boomsticks go boom. Also, if this was to become a popular sport, we might just start getting some military recruits that can already shoot.

So the ?Overland Biathlon? would be a running event, in an attempt to make this sport more accessible to all. Despite the fact that I’m an Kalashnikov fan, the carried rifle ought to be a semiauto M-16 variant (AR-15 and the like) because that’s our service rifle. If necessary, there could be a copper plated or paper patched bullet version of the normally jacketed 5.56 round to help the targets last a bit longer. The targets would be the same steel plates, but suspended, to ring like a bell when you hit them. The name of the game is hitting your target, not driving tacks, and the audible feedback from a ringing steel plate is immediate.

The course should be laid out as a cross country run, if possible. Running in circles ought to be preserved as penalty laps for athletes that miss their targets. Carrying a loaded weapon between stations would be prohibited, participants would be required to remove the magazine, clear the chamber, and close the bolt on a florescent orange plastic flag/dummy round before moving on to the next station. Standard procedure would be to ?dummy cord? this to the rifle. Shooters should have to carry all their needed ammo with them while running the course, and they must continue shooting at the targets until they get a hit at each station. If there were any misses, they are forced to run the mentioned penalty lap. Participants shoot at the targets in all the standard positions (standing; kneeling and prone).

Besides putting a course on every possible military base, once I manage to convince the rest of the world that golf is the most useless sport imaginable there should be plenty of unused courses ready for conversion to Overland Biathlon. Oh, and all those unused golf driving ranges? They get converted to drive-by shooting ranges.