Request for Assistance-Is Bullseye Pistol Waxing or Waning; Looking for some stats

Hi all. Some elements of our local NW Ohio conservation club, with the only indoor 50 yd and separate indoor 25 yd non-commercial range around, are souring on Bullseye pistol shooting claiming "the sport is dying out".  I'm looking for some numbers from CMP and NRA to get an idea of how many matches and participants they are aware of in 2023 to date and in 2022 vs. likely covid lows in 21 and 20.  I shot competitively for OSU in the 70s and later in the Army and am getting back into it now that I'm retired.  I'd greatly appreciate learning contacts you may have in both organizations that might readily have this type of data at hand I can use to support my efforts to rebuild the local program leading up to a postal and or traveling league and hosting some state matches again.  Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Dying?  No!   But I wouldn’t say it’s healthy.  This is a chart of NPC entries to 2019 from 1994. Showing a continuous decline.  What’s causing it?  Other more “Glamourous”  events perhaps… and the over-hyping of self-defense as the rationale for owning a pistol.  I dunno???

Just the thoughts of an old guy (pushing 80):
- Bullseye (CMP) & Precision Pistol (NRA) are now competing with what many newer shooters consider to be more "exciting" competitions - IDPA, IPSC, USPSA, Steel Challenge, 3-Gun, etc.
- Handgun manufacturers are producing and marketing an unbelievable number of (marginally improved) models that are specifically targeting the people who are being convinced that they need firearms for "self-defense" - and, yes, that is being seriously "over hyped" by numerous pro gun organizations. I say that as a Benefactor level life member of the NRA and someone who has held a concealed carry permit and carried a handgun very frequently for about forty years.  Most of the people that I know who have carry permits (and that's a large number over the last thirty years) do not practice (or carry) enough to realistically defend themselves in a life-threatening situation. Full disclosure, in all of the years (outside of the military) that I have carried a firearm I have only had to draw it once - and did not have to fire it.
- Hopefully, there will still be enough people who derive pride and pleasure in achieving the levels of expertise required for earning the various designations in CMP and Precision Pistol.  Skeet, Trap, and Sporting Clays, that I have also successively competed in, have periodically lowered the standards to maintain participation and I would hope that this would not be true in"bullseye".

Nuff said. JE

Our range as a beautiful 25/50 yard line, but they gave it to the .22 junior shooters without any notice to the rest of the club membership, so you drive 25 miles to practice, but the range is closed.  We have 5 rifle lines and two just for .22, but the board chose to do this even with Bullseye shooter's on it.

I ran into some guy's practicing for USPSA, so going to give that a try. Way cheaper to start and get to learn a new skill set.

Action shooting sports have moved it along.

Cost has decimated many shooting sports that require many shots.

2700’s are expensive.

Like trapshooting has also diminished.

There's four guys on the line at our summer league. The usual summertime activities (golf, fishing, motorcycles, etc) have taken precedence this year.

One of the best shooters on our team recently joined the Air Force, and the pistolsmith who built and serviced the majority of the guns that the guys in the league recently passed away.

And there's the ones who prefer to shoot the winter league because it's only 50'.

Add the price and relative scarcity of reloading components and yeah.. it's dying out in my area.

One local club prez (who had a state of the art range) said there’s no interest but another club built a following with inexpensive leagues and fun matches. They just added turning targets they designed and built themselves. Their Monday night league is full. Build it, promote it, make it fun and low cost….get results. I developed and ran a state wide championship for $5/900

Bullseye is an old-school sport. Club and match websites tend to be antiquated, matches have to be found on NRA Shooting Sports PDFs or on the CMP’s awful competition site, and there are no modern third-party platforms like Practiscore or ScoreChaser to find matches or see results. That’s a shame. It’s not on the match directors or shooters—the organizations running the sport are living completely in the past. You cannot grow a healthy sport if the governing body makes no attempt to appeal to potential participants.

It’s not the cost to enter or the difficulty creating barriers to entry… We like to pretend those are the problem, but 2-gun and 3-gun sports, and the precision rifle sports, are even more expensive, and those sports are well-attended. USPSA, even at the “lowest” level (Production Class), is oodles more expensive than shooting a 900 with a .22 or a 2700 in .22 Only. At its most exotic (Limited Optics and Open), there are guns that will make Cabot look reasonable, holsters that cost as much as shooting boxes, and ultra high volume reloading setups.

However, the governing organizations for these sports are all over social media, large matches are widely promoted and usually have slots designated for industry and press entries, and it’s extraordinarily easy to find matches for the practical disciplines on Practiscore.

Consequently, state and regional matches have hundreds of participants (and waitlists!) and sponsors jump at the opportunity to promote and participate. It’s not a cost, difficulty, or time issue.

We can’t blame the “self-defense” community (the majority of new pistoleers) for opting to engage with practical sports… those organizations and the brands most prominently featured in them actively cater to that community. CMP and the NRA have made no effort to engage with shooters from this crowd, so they will remain ignorant to bullseye matches.

Remember when that Dicken kid put down a wannabe mass shooter at some 30-40 yards in a mall? There was a trending hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube for “#DickenDrill” for almost a month. Where was CMP’s social media manager?! A golden opportunity to explain the practical benefits of a pure marksmanship sport, completely missed.

In sum—the organizations that sanction bullseye competition cannot continue to market bullseye shooting through 1980s methods. They need a modern matchfinding platform. Existing NRA/CMP bullseye shooters aren’t going anywhere, notwithstanding folks aging out, because there are no real alternative precision pistol sports. The organizations need to look at growing sports like NRL, Brutality Matches, and PCSL for examples of how to engage with younger shooters and the modern “self-defense” focused pistoleer—that means not missing opportunities to emphasize the relevance of traditional pistol marksmanship. That means engaging with brands, shooting press, and social media personalities. If the organizations refuse to acknowledge the modern pistol owner, they will continue to occupy a smaller and smaller niche.

Every week, there's a group of new pistol shooters taking a self-defense class at the other range when our league is shooting.

Exactly zero of those people have shown any interest in what we're doing.

John B Fowler wrote:Hi all. Some elements of our local NW Ohio conservation club, with the only indoor 50 yd and separate indoor 25 yd non-commercial range around, are souring on Bullseye pistol shooting claiming "the sport is dying out".  I'm looking for some numbers from CMP and NRA to get an idea of how many matches and participants they are aware of in 2023 to date and in 2022 vs. likely covid lows in 21 and 20.  I shot competitively for OSU in the 70s and later in the Army and am getting back into it now that I'm retired.  I'd greatly appreciate learning contacts you may have in both organizations that might readily have this type of data at hand I can use to support my efforts to rebuild the local program leading up to a postal and or traveling league and hosting some state matches again.  Thanks in advance for your assistance.

If assume you mean Oak Harbor. If Bullseye at Oak Harbor is shut down, I will cry. That's where I broke 2600 for the first time. I have many fond memories there.

I can't give you much in the way of data, but I can give you plenty of anecdotes to support your Club continuing to support Bullseye Pistol.

JRV, don't know about the expense already had my revolvers, so Speed Beez holster, belt and speed loader's holders were under 300 bucks. I am starting at 66 years old, so I don't think I going to set any speed records just have fun.  


First Bullseye match I showed up to over 35 years ago; according to the old guy running it the cost of the gear I needed to shoot was just a little less than the price of the truck I was driving and it was new.

JRV wrote:Bullseye is an old-school sport.  Club and match websites tend to be antiquated, matches have to be found on NRA Shooting Sports PDFs or on the CMP’s awful competition site, and there are no modern third-party platforms like Practiscore or ScoreChaser to find matches or see results...  

Your whole post is well-stated (I'm trimming here so as not to clutter up the screen.)

A few points I'd add:

- Bullseye's core target demographic (as I've stated in other threads) should be the 40-something/50-something/60-something people whose kids are out of the house and they now have free time and some "fun money" for hobbies. This doesn't preclude juniors or 20-somethings participating in Bullseye; however, it is extremely challenging to get into the sport if you don't have external funding nor a lot of free time.
- Some people are (understandably) reticent to have their name on the Internet and have it associated with gun ownership. This ties into the "Bullseye is an old-school sport" comment. I think there'd be a lot of resistance in Bullseye for a system like Practiscore.

My 2¢; worth every penny.

Lots of reasons…but where are the solutions?   I believe also that Benchrest Rifle is experiencing a bit of a drop off… with a lot of those guys heading off to “F class”.  

Here is a link to a Study on the number of participant in shooting sports in the USA.I have no clue as to how accurate it is.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191954/participants-in-shooting-sport-in-the-us-since-2006/

I also want to add a point or two.  If you look back in the history of BE / Precision Shooting (including rifle disciplines), you find many examples of participation of younger shooters, that had limited exposure to financial burden of participating in the sport.  More so, they were rewarded for their accomplishments.  I am talking about shooters that were sponsored by their organizations, namely various military teams from all branches, police departments of all levels, US Customs & Border Control, even many "no-pictures" folks.  Many of these shooters were professionally trained at their 20-30-something, and were passing on their knowledge onto the teammates.  With budget cuts many of such programs are no longer exist.  It is rather opposite - one hand will be enough to count what's left.  Precision shooting is a developed professional skill, and we have less folks possessing it and being able to pass it onto aged "casual" shooters that can afford participating in the sport without sponsorships.

AP

There are a few bright spots, folks; don't get too discouraged.

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) at Monterey is reviving their Bullseye program. This makes me happy. This program has the legacy of Gordon Nakagawa and RJ Thomas. I have been fortunate enough to work with some of these Sailors and Marines and they are legitimately interested in Bullseye, and they are squared away when I see them on the firing line.

I implore all of you to get involved in running your local matches. We need to do this at the local level first.

I 

Pinetree wrote:Every week, there's a group of new pistol shooters taking a self-defense class at the other range when our league is shooting.

Exactly zero of those people have shown any interest in what we're doing.

Some of the biggest names in defensive/professional training (Pressburg, Haggard, Vickers, Defoor, Langdon) have students shooting B8s.  

Guys like Pressburg have shooters doing it for score at 25 yards.  Heck, there’s a thread with thousands of replies about shooting short line B8s on Pistol-Forum, which is an absolute hub of the “who’s who” in defensive and practical pistol training.  Pat Kelley (an industry journalist, big Steel Challenge guy, and a Federal/Speer ambassador) has been flooding forums and social media with bullseye-related content lately.  

Every one of us can “connect the dots” between our discipline and those schools of training.  None of us can simply count on new shooters to walk over before or after a class.  However, if we are ignorant of where the overlap is (for lack of an interest in defensive/practical pistol), how would we even know to capitalize on that opportunity?

If the goal is to expand or even simply maintain the sport, we cannot be equally ignorant about the ways widely-known, nationally-recognized trainers use bullseye in their programs as new students or local trainers.  Of course they will show zero interest—in the absence of educated ambassadorship, they have no reason to show interest in the unknown.  We (bullseye shooters) have to know that bullseye is relevant and help point eyes in the right directions.  NRA and CMP have utterly failed to do this.  

Things that anyone can do:

- highlight B8/precision content from those recognizable instructors on your range’s (and local trainer’s) social media
- talk to your local cadre of trainers about hosting one of the big B8/precision pistol advocate trainers
- the big one: take classes and shoot matches outside of the “bullseye” network.  For example, there are a lot of trainers using a Langdon-developed B8 drill called “The Advanced Super Test” as a diagnostic in classes.  Defoor’s Pistol Standards, Pressburg’s No Fail Drill, all very common.  When you compare these drills to what we do in Rapid Fire with one hand… it’s absolute child’s play!  Free chance to market the sport through performance.  John Bickar is spot-on—if the big organizations don’t take stewardship of the sport seriously, it’s on us at the local level.

JRV wrote:

Pinetree wrote:Every week, there's a group of new pistol shooters taking a self-defense class at the other range when our league is shooting.

Exactly zero of those people have shown any interest in what we're doing.

Some of the biggest names in defensive/professional training (Pressburg, Haggard, Vickers, Defoor, Langdon) have students shooting B8s.  

Guys like Pressburg have shooters doing it for score at 25 yards.  Heck, there’s a thread with thousand of replies about shooting short line B8s on Pistol-Forum, which is an absolute hub of the “who’s who” in defensive and practical pistol training.  Pat Kelley (an industry journalist, big Steel Challenge guy, and a Federal/Speer ambassador) has been flooding forums and social media with bullseye-related content lately.  

  It's hard to imagine that learning how to hold the sights steady while pressing the trigger would be detrimental to the necessary skills for self defence

JRV wrote:John Bickar is spot-on—if the big organizations don’t take stewardship of the sport seriously, it’s on us at the local level.

For context: I run 26 "1200s" and two 2700s per year (plus often a few other matches). That's a chance for any Bullseye shooter within an hour's drive of 95014 to shoot 3,660 rounds in competition over the course of a year.

seriously, it’s on us at the local level

I can't stress this enough. It's on us.

John Bickar brings up a point, perhaps inadvertently but it’s there.  He notes that the majority of his matches that he runs are “1200” which I believe would be a 60 shot 22 and a 60 shot centerfire.  I believe this may be because his matches are in the evening.  One thing I have noticed with shooters in other disciplines is that they’re willing to shoot monthly matches, but they’d like to be able to do it in the morning.  Even a 2 gun “1800” can be longer than 4 hours and a “2700” becomes a marathon.  I’m all for having 2700s at regionals, Nationals State Championships etc. but those are usually only a handful of multi day matches.  I’ve always held that a club match should be short enough to remain fun.

Wobbley wrote:I’m all for having 2700s at regionals, Nationals State Championships etc. but those are usually only a handful of multi day matches.  I’ve always held that a club match should be short enough to remain fun.

Another great marketing point for bullseye… if the goal is to shoot, bullseye is dense with shooting.  

A USPSA match is typically 120-130 rounds at my local clubs, spread over seven or eight stages.  Running the match can take upwards of five hours.  Total time actually shooting?  Somewhere between 70 and 120 seconds, from the fastest and most accurate guys to the slowest reasonably competent shooters… i.e. each match is nearly five hours of pasting targets, resetting steel, and trying not to get bored—and the ultimate goal is to shoot the fewest accurate shots as quickly as possible.  

About a half-percent of the time spent at a USPSA match is shooting.  

A 900 takes about an hour and a half.  Thirty minutes of SF, a minute of TF, and thirty seconds of RF, and the rest is scoring, loading mags, and walking.  

Over one-third of the time committed to an NRA/CMP-rules 900 is spent shooting.  That’s really nice.

john bickar wrote:There are a few bright spots, folks; don't get too discouraged.

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) at Monterey is reviving their Bullseye program. This makes me happy. This program has the legacy of Gordon Nakagawa and RJ Thomas. I have been fortunate enough to work with some of these Sailors and Marines and they are legitimately interested in Bullseye, and they are squared away when I see them on the firing line.

Thank goodness.  When I heard that NPS was shelving their program a few years back... "disappointed" was an understatement.

All those folks down there shooting new guns in the CHL classes and none of them show up for our stuff ( paraphrased ).
How many of us have walked down there invited them to join us, hand them a flier about bullseye or otherwise engaged with them?
Realize that they came to the range for a specific reason. Most dont want to bother us while we are doing our thing.
Sometimes it's just as simple as asking them and the barriers come down. Response will still likely be low? But 1 is infinitely larger than none.

Pinetree wrote:Every week, there's a group of new pistol shooters taking a self-defense class at the other range when our league is shooting.

Exactly zero of those people have shown any interest in what we're doing.

In my experience, most of us local guys/gals (myself admittedly to) show "exactly zero" interest in even saying Hi to people outside the club at the public range when we're scoring targets. The new shooters are in an intimidating setting and it's up to us to invite them in.

I got a shy friend of mine legitimately interested in shooting BE in NW Indiana and the two times he tried to introduce himself he came back to me with lies they told him about how his equipment was unsuitable and they were uninviting. 

That the NRA has continued to fail us doesn't mean we have to be exclusionary too.

Thank you JRV and John B for your compelling contributions to the thread and the sport!

JRV wrote:

Wobbley wrote:I’m all for having 2700s at regionals, Nationals State Championships etc. but those are usually only a handful of multi day matches.  I’ve always held that a club match should be short enough to remain fun.

Another great marketing point for bullseye… if the goal is to shoot, bullseye is dense with shooting.  

A USPSA match is typically 120-130 rounds at my local clubs, spread over seven or eight stages.  Running the match can take upwards of five hours.  Total time actually shooting?  Somewhere between 70 and 120 seconds, from the fastest and most accurate guys to the slowest reasonably competent shooters… i.e. each match is nearly five hours of pasting targets, resetting steel, and trying not to get bored—and the ultimate goal is to shoot the fewest accurate shots as quickly as possible.  

About a half-percent of the time spent at a USPSA match is shooting.  

A 900 takes about an hour and a half.  Thirty minutes of SF, a minute of TF, and thirty seconds of RF, and the rest is scoring, loading mags, and walking.  

Over one-third of the time committed to an NRA/CMP-rules 900 is spent shooting.  That’s really nice.

A bunch of bigger USPSA matches have 10 stages and consume 250+ rounds of ammo.  And you only need to have one gun plus magazines and a holster.  Each stage has a “PAR” time which is normally 60-90 seconds.  So the amount of shooting is as much or more than we do.  You shoot each stage then reset/score then head off to the next stage.  It takes all day.  But that’s a big championship.  See this for an example, [url=http://www.practicalpistol.net/Documents/2022 Battle for the North Coast - Match Book.pdf]http://www.practicalpistol.net/Documents/2022%20Battle%20for%20the%20North%20Coast%20-%20Match%20Book.pdf[/url]. They get 150 competitors we get 15…. If ours has more shooting I’m not seeing it.

Par times aren’t “time on the gun.” That’s the total time you have to fix your gun in the event of a malfunction. The example of a major USPSA match more than makes my point:

The most recent Battle for the North Coast was a 270+ round count match with 10 total stages plus a “chrono” ammo testing stage.

If you check the results on Practiscore, the top half of competitors had total times between three and four minutes. The slowest time I could find was about ten minutes.

Those folks paid $140 bucks, plus ammo costs, to shoot “all day,” and they spent less time with their hands on their guns than a single slowfire string. The slowest guy spent less than 1% of his time out there touching a gun; 99%+ of his time was spent making small talk and putting paster stickers on targets.

It took me fifteen years of practical pistol matches to realize I was spending the vast majority of my time standing around and doing chores while wearing an empty gun. TargetPistolGuy’s YouTube channel was the “lightbulb” moment for me, because all of his match videos showed lines of people shooting constantly. That looked nice—and it was.