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Steve, I agree with everything you said except one thing. I'm afraid I may have given you the wrong idea about the point I was trying to make. I personally don't score any shot outside the scoring rings, on any target. All my shots that miss the scoring rings (too !@#$%^ many sometimes) are scored as misses with a value of zero. In one silhouette match I had an AD due to a faulty set trigger, and scored that as a miss even though I didn't have to do that according to our rules. No, my issue was with the thought of making all new shooters shoot the difficult matches alongside the veterans, with no chance to get up to speed in a more forgiving environment. A good example would be the silhouette match I described in which we used some targets of double size, in order to encourage new shooters. In this instance there were no existing records from prior centuries for comparison, and we weren't trying to 'prove' how well we could beat the newbies. Admittedly our club has (had) our share of dogmatic idiots who would rather win than encourage others, but fortunately someone else was running that match. (VBG) The point of my diatribe was that IMO it would be in our best interest as an org to try to encourage new shooters by giving them a venue in which they could have a good time, instead of worrying about how bad their scores would look alongside the scores of the veterans. It certainly doesn't hurt me a bit to have a newbie shoot a score close to mine so that he can brag a llttle to his friends. In fact I've even been known to sandbag a little bit in order to foster a sense of accomplishment in a new shooter when he beats me. But please don't tell anyone, OK? I'd sure hate for anyone to think I wasn't politically correct............. I'm NOT advocating changing the rules of any of the historical matches; rather, I'm in favor of creating or modifying matches so that a new shooter can have a pleasant experience instead of going away thinking that he'll never be able to compete equally. I try to remember that we don't have a captive audience here, we are trying to lure new & existing shooters into our particular venue and they aren't exactly beating down our door to get in. And as I said before, I have caught far more flies with honey than with vinegar. This thread kinda reminds me of a Peanuts comic strip I once saw. Charlie Brown & Linus were playing marbles and Lucy came up to watch. She said, "You guys are doing that all wrong, you know." "Yeah, we know." Linus replied. "Well, why don't you do it the right way, then?" was Lucy's waspish retort. Charlie Brown's response was absolutely classic: "We couldn't possibly change now, we've been doing it this way for too long now!" I personally am in this venue for the rifles and the cameraderie, not the scores or the one-upmanship 'political correctness' contests. And certainly not the 'historical correctness' aspect since, as my comparison with palm rests and telescopic sights points out, there really isn't much cast-in-stone historical correctness in this Schuetzen game. We're so focused on our own petty little issues that sometimes it's hard for us to remember that Schuetzen all started with crossbows, about 400-500 years ago now. Sure has changed, hasn't it? Best regards, Joe PS: for some of the rest of you, repeat after me, "Swimming lessons do NOT dumb down water sports..............."
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