Tag: Shooting

The Ruthlessness of Smiling Faces: What people are really up to

First of all, even though I am talking about a recent fast draw competition with the Ohio Fast Draw guys in Ohio, I am not talking about that event, but many other things that are relevant in ways that aren’t always so obvious.  Human nature is what it is, and all things are applicable.  But this particular example is appropriate across the tapestry of competition.  And to that point, I am used to extreme ruthlessness in human nature.  I don’t see the smiles that people provide to disarm your sensibilities as being innocent.  I see the worst in people because that’s my experience based on years of opinion.  So, when I attended a recent Ohio Fast Draw competition in Cleveland, I went out in support for the group because the attendance was dropping, and I wanted to boost the membership with my presence.  But from my point of view, it was hard in the second half of the year to attend the events, starting with the one in August, which I missed.  It was a late night with many good GOP people, including Bernie Moreno, Warren Davidson, George Lang, and many others, and we stayed way too late listening with a VIP perspective to a Jason Aldean concert.  I didn’t get on the road in time to get to Cleveland, which broke my routine for the year.  Up until that point, I had attended all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions.  But August, September, and the rest of the year until Christmas are too busy for me.  My goal for the year was to get to all the Ohio Fast Draw competitions and show my support for them.  But once I missed the one in August, it bothered me to have that intention disrupted.

My gun minutes before a competition

I learned at the next event I did manage to get to that other shooters were not unhappy that I did not show up.  I had been winning many trophies, and people felt that because I wasn’t there, they’d get a better chance to win themselves.  I didn’t let it bother me because I like the people who are typically in Fast Draw.  I understand and respect the ruthlessness of human nature.  So, I put those thoughts into a category of their own to deal with as I saw fit.  Even so, I tried hard to make the next competition to support the organization.  I didn’t have time for it.  I didn’t need any more trophies for the year.  I just wanted to see attendance grow, not recede.  I think Fast Draw should be a sport that more people participate in; it’s better than golf, bowling, or other competitive events.  But a lot of young people these days don’t know much about gun fighting because it’s not part of their cultural experience, as more woke activities have become part of their lives.  So, I am interested in seeing organizations like Ohio Fast Draw survive well into the future, and I would like to see them grow in popularity.  But when I showed up to the most recent Cleveland event, I was already strung well too thin, and didn’t have the time to give.  I attended to support friends.  I was disappointed that I wasn’t very welcome and that many of them hoped I wouldn’t show up.  Now, things get murky because people often don’t say what they really mean.  And they usually hide malicious intent behind appearing helpful.  So people think that what they believe deep within themselves is hidden from the outside world and that nobody really knows what’s going on if they don’t admit to something.  Well, I know everything that goes on.  I understand every aspect of human nature, so nothing stays hidden from me.  I know what is going on with everyone at all times.  And it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what was happening when I arrived at the Cleveland competition. 

In Fast Draw, severe rules for activity on the firing line, safety, and other considerations are rigorous.  Some of the more competitive people in these events go crazy when they hear a cell phone and people whisper in the background while shooting.  They get mad at every little distraction.  So, given that context, I thought it was highly unusual that at my gun check at this event, there was so much concern over my gun having a sticky trigger.  I didn’t ask for any advice; it was the same gun I had used to win several competitions that year, and it worked well for me.  But many Fast Draw shooters perform a lot of work on their guns, hoping to give themselves a slight edge in speed.  So it mystifies them that I use a mostly stock gun and that it has a heavy hammer pull.  Now, given some of the people involved in volunteering to tear my gun apart looking for a problem that wasn’t there, I thought being friendly and respectful was more important than showing anger that I was missing the opportunity to practice before the competition started.  I think they were genuinely trying to be helpful.  But I also felt that something more malicious was going on, and the longer it went on, the more angry I got. 

At the end of a lot of work, several shooters offered to loan me a gun to shoot with that day, which, on the surface, appeared helpful.  But they all know what distractions and changing anything on the firing line do to the process.  So, I found it disrespectful to see that they had made a point to look like helpful behavior to sabotage my approach to shooting in that competition.  I didn’t ask for help.  I didn’t want any help.  And I would have rather been left alone because there was more going on than trying to appear helpful.  The combined efforts were an attempt at sabotage because as the day progressed, it became pronounced that I was the center of many of their thoughts, and they had prepared for that event with an intention against me personally.  Here’s the deal: I won a lot at these competitions because of my shooting method, not because of the tricks of the gun or luck.  My times are consistently good because I shoot close to the hip in a fashion that looks slower to go fast.  And the frustration against me has been that I look like I’m not trying to go fast all the time and shoot in the .300s and even .200s.  I could, but in Ohio Fast Draw, missing the target would become more common, and you would get penalized for missing.  You are judged on speed and accuracy.  I ended up doing OK for the day.  The worries about my gun and the overall process of the day did have an impact, but I worked through it.  Part of the benefit of competitions like that is that learning to manage stress under tremendous pressure is the real takeaway.  So I thought it was a positive experience.  But I was very disappointed to see that so many of those other shooters were happy to see me having a bad day.  They wanted it, which was a good lesson that applies to most things.  It’s the way people are.  You hope that people will overcome that natural tendency.  But Fast Draw is meant to be ruthless, and people being friendly to each other is only a cosmetic ruse for their true intentions.  While I wanted to think more about people, it wasn’t enjoyable to see where their minds were.  The main rule in gun fighting competitions is that you don’t point out every little rule that might distract a shooter on the line, then break all those rules to gain personal advantage.  That behavior might help a person win a few times here and there.  However, it will destroy the initiative of any future shooters who want to take up the sport and grow in a positive direction.  This is precisely why attendance this year has been light and is only getting worse.  When it comes to human behavior, I don’t miss anything, and the moral to the story in this case is that a short-sighted win only hurts the future, which is becoming obvious to everyone.

I expect ruthlessness out of people.  And again, I’m talking about more than my experiences with the Ohio Fast Draw Association.  I would like to relax and spend time with people of common interest in shooting sports.  But often as it is in most things in life, you don’t get what you want.  You get what you get, and you either deal with it, or you are crushed by it.  So with that in mind, don’t try to hide ruthless behavior through a thin veil of helpfulness.  I see it all for what it is, at every level that it’s presented.  There is nothing about human nature, or action, that I do not see. And I see it in ways that most people even hide from themselves. There’s a reason I don’t say much to anybody, it’s because I am perpetually let down by other people all the time and I don’t expect much out of them.  And I don’t ask much of anybody because I don’t want them to have to lie to me when they have no intention to live up to my expectations. I have to manage my disappointment in people by limiting how much I interact with them.  But never think I’m not going to see the truth that is really there looming in the background.  Even if it’s just a shooting sport in recreation, or if it’s millions of dollars at stake.  It’s all the same game played by all the same kind of people for all the same reasons.  People in life want the least path to success with the least effort.  And they hate people who work hard and develop themselves skillfully.  As I have said many times, which is a big feature of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, “Rules are made by the losers of the world to give them an advantage over the competent.”  And as much as I know that rule to be the fact of life, it does bother me each time it is confirmed true by reality. 

Rich Hoffman

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Slump Busters: Setting aggressive targets, and hitting them

It comes up a lot since the dumb and ridiculous Covid rules of employment, but Slump Busters are every bit as much of a thing now as they have always been.  People didn’t decide to loosen up their target acquisition consciously.  The human race still expects excellence even though the New World Order is clearly trying to make it easier for losers to succeed in the world at the expense of excellence and competency.  Setting low targets that are easy to hit has become the norm in the world regarding political expectations, and that trend has had disgusting consequences.  I have been talking about those observations for a while now, and they are most evident in drive-thru windows, which have become incredibly slow as Gen Z has become so much slower and cumbersome as they were taught during their education years by a society that has been infected by Marxist political movements to severely lower their expectations on what can be achieved in life.  People are still people and always will be, and it’s most evident in the sexual practices of a society what their true essence is regarding expectation.  And to that point, I have been talking about slump busters a lot lately.  I don’t participate in the slump-buster mentality and never have.  I set aggressive targets for myself in all aspects of my life, and I hit them.  Thinking like a shooter, I aim for the bottlecap at 100 yards.  Not the side of the barn, to make it easy to be successful.  Even though I have been married for many decades, almost 40 years, I remember the mating game well enough when I would go to a bar or nightclub with friends and watch the process unfold of slump busting, and it is precisely what we are seeing in our economy now, along the same lines, and it’s a disgusting reality that needs significant reform.

It’s not sexist to talk about this topic as it’s all-natural biology.  Women can pick any sex partner they’d like any time they want to.  All they have to do is let the male of their choice know they are interested, and men are designed always to be ready.  So these rules don’t apply to women as they are in the role of biology, the target that men must hit.  It’s up to the women to set aggressive targets and make things difficult for men.  And the more beautiful they are, the more motivated men are to attract the woman’s attention for the necessity of success.  When a wealthy man has an attractive young woman on their arm, they are communicating to the world that they are good at what they do and can attract a prime female to their bed.  So when going out to the meat market, I remember well enough how the game was played and still is.  People didn’t change; only the approach to politics by radical Marxist forces setting policy at the level of the United Nations to micromanage the way people interact with each other with new woke rules that are not applicable to the desires of all human beings.  When picking up women at a bar, the rules never change.  There are eight o’clock girls.  Then, some are still available at 2 in the morning.  And those are the slump busters.  If a woman is still available late at night, nobody wants her, and taking her home would be very easy and much less rewarding.  But if you are trying to knock the rust off social engagement with the reward of sexual conquest, then a slump buster may be the thing.  I would add that it’s a loser mentality to lower yourself to that level, but those lacking confidence in hitting a target may need to hit the broad side of a barn to make themselves feel better.

When you first get to a bar, if there are pretty girls there at all, because they don’t need to go to those places to get male attention, they can pick anybody off the rack at the grocery store.  But if they do end up at a bar or nightclub and are intent on finding a sexual partner for the short term, then they might be there at 8 PM, but they’ll be leaving with someone of their choosing by 9.  They don’t last long.  But the ugly people are still around late at night, and the most hideous of the ugly are all that’s left at 2 in the morning. Nobody will be bragging the next day that they ended up with a slump buster at the end of the night, just as nobody who thinks of themselves as a good shooter is bragging about hitting a barn from 100 yards.  Slump busters are confidence builders.  But for a person with a lot of confidence already, they would be disgusted in selling themselves short of a true victory in the realm of conquest.  Slump busters might satisfy the need to hit a target, but the quality of the effort isn’t worth sharing with the public.  I never liked the game, so I was married to my wife by the time I was 19.  I had seen enough very early in my life.

I met my wife while she was in the car with another guy.  I saw her at a traffic light and followed her boyfriend’s car to a parking lot, pulled up next to her side of the vehicle, and asked her for her phone number.  I was very aggressive with dating whoever I wanted and did not have any restrictions on confidence.  On the confidence front, I still shoot at very aggressive targets.  I shoot at the printed details on a bottlecap from 1000 yards.  I’m not just happy hitting the bottlecap.  And that’s what I expect from the world around me.  And when they indicate they are only excited to hit the side of a barn from ten feet, I naturally get very mad at them.  I would walk up to random women and ask them out, even in groups of four or five.  I had no fear of failure, and most of them said yes on the spot and if they were indifferent, they said yes a few weeks after.  And that’s still true to this day.  My wife was very beautiful, and everyone wanted to go out with her.  So, if you want to target pretty people like that, you must be bold.  So I took her from her date and married her.  And I can say that I never had a slump buster.  I never settled and never will, which is valid for everything.  And just because a bunch of pinheaded globalists suddenly think the human race is going to lower their expectations for what is possible in the world and that slump-busters will become the norm, not the exception, well, they have another thing coming.  I would say that people are embarrassed by their slump-busting trends over the last few years. Making America Great Again with high expectations and the kind of women who are off the market at 8 PM instead of building the world around the losers at 2 AM is coming back in style.  And the business world better accommodate for it because, ready or not, here it comes.  Slump busters are for losers.  And people don’t want to be losers.

Rich Hoffman

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Process Efficiency Through Fast Draw Shooting Sports: How to eliminate communism from any culture

There is a root cause of big government and communism in general, and it essentially all comes down to laziness.  The best hedge a country could have to protect itself from communism is an emphasis on hard work and personal improvement.  If you have an efficient society where personal conduct is rewarded, you will have a better society generally.  And they will not vote for communism and all the various follies of Marxism.  I have figured out that over time by participating in Cowboy Fast Draw, particularly a great group of people I have known for quite a while, many years before I started shooting with them, The Ohio Fast Draw Association.  I think of it as one of the best sports that the human race has come up with, but in making it an actual sport that has very rigid rules and regulations, as most shooting sports do that involve real guns and ammunition, the drive toward speed and accuracy has created a window into the purity of human intellect that I find endlessly fascinating.  And that’s what was on my mind as my wife and I had a wonderful meal at the Punderson Manor overlooking one of the deepest lakes formed by glaciation near downtown Cleveland, Ohio.  We were camping across the lake and preparing for one of the first Fast Draw competitions of the year just a few miles to the north, and economic systems and process efficiencies were most on my mind as I thought about current events over pork covered in honey and garlic sauce.  Out of all the educational institutions and means of human intellect, I think the best representation of efficiency matched with risk formed out of Cowboy Fast Draw and America’s fascination with Western arts and entertainment. 

It was something most obviously revealed during Covid, which we all know now was created in a Wuhan lab and released by China and a lot of other nefarious governments for a Great Reset by the World Economic Forum to spread communist-style government micromanaged by a massive, leftist, Administrative State.  And so many companies and governments were ready to jump on and sign us all up for it by a media poised to spread the news as fast as television broadcasts could put up death graphs on the side of their visuals.  This was the theme of my 2021 book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which I wrote and published during the first year of the Biden presidency, on the heels of the most ostentatious takeover by governments over private industry using Covid as their excuse.  But I wasn’t happy just pointing it out; I wanted to understand why human beings did this to themselves because that is where the real answers to life are.  That is why people were so quick to wear masks during the Covid crises, which were artificially created.  More specifically, when you look at a process for a big company, you will find that they have too many administrative employees and entirely too many rules.  Incompetent people use rules and large administrative practices to hide their incompetency from the eyes of a competitive world.  And you really don’t see that in people until you hang around people addicted to speed like there are in Cowboy Fast Draw events.  Human beings create a lot of rules and drag on any innovation system because they are timid and weak as personalities who look to shield themselves from risk through legislation.  And it is those kinds of people who make governments restrictive and crave communism and the security of a perpetual nanny state.

Of course, the sport of fast draw, especially The Ohio Fast Draw Association that I shoot with several times a year, is to shoot at a target when a light flashes on it and to draw a .45 caliber single action pistol with a wax bullet, as fast as you can from a holster at various distances.  What I like about the Ohio Fast Draw guys is that they have a variety of combat scenarios that are part of their competitions, and it forces you to find the fastest means to achieve the objective within some rigid rules that are always part of shooting sports.  The endeavor aims to manage risk and competence toward the stated goal.  Not to run and hide from it, as most organizations do where this problem of individual merit isn’t addressed.  In my real life, outside of shooting sports, which I consider a real vacation from the sluggish minds of bureaucracy and considerable government inefficiency, I would say that most people have some element of timidity in them that is open to government expansion over improved processing, I see how a lack of management over personal risk drags the world down in unhealthy ways.  People love their rules, their regulations, and their slow rate of completion in things because they are terrified of the actual responsibility of accomplishment.  At Cowboy Fast Draw events, all people generally agree that the goal is to shoot fast, hit the target, and find the most efficient process to perform the task.  That means drawing the gun from my holster in fractions of a second and shooting as soon as the barrel clears the leather.  There is no hiding the intent behind process rules disguised to protect the incompetent from the expectations of performance.  And I never get enough of it.  There are usually six or more events per year, and I always get a lot out of all of them, but what I get most is time away from the sluggish people of the world and their slow obsessions with administrative practices that hide their grotesque lives from competitive expectations. 

Since my last competitive event with these Ohio Fast Draw guys, I have been to Japan twice to deal with real-world issues of efficiency and competence necessity.  In Japan, they do not run from competitive expectations; they fully embrace them as a mass culture.  They are not in love with the process flow that protects themselves from competitive expectations, which is part of their samurai culture that is still alive and well there.  As my wife and I ate our meal and looked out over that lake, this was May of 2024, and my last competition was September of 2023. During that time, I had a chance to observe Japanese culture up close and personal, including how they eat.  Many lights came on for me as to the cause of human society leaning toward communist governments and why corporations of all kinds were so quick to do so.  Those elements of the fast draw and Japanese society painted across the current events of our times revealed a nasty sentiment holding back the human race for many years.  But the sport of fast draw had purged it out and away from its hiding places, and I have found myself obsessed with the results.  It was the root cause behind all the Lean work that had been developed in Japan with the Toyota efficiency standards, into why people behaved the way they did when work was presented to them, and responsibility for success fell on their shoulders.  It would take America’s gun culture to match up with the most successful economy in the world to evolve the sentiment, which I always cherish at competitive shooting events that tell more than just the story of American tradition.  But peel back the veil to the most wonderful elements of human intellect, the ability to use risk to produce efficiency and innovation that otherwise would never come to be.

Rich Hoffman

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Wanted: Men who can shoot and defend our nation against evil

Observing the situation clearly, and now no longer speculating what foreign intentions have been for our country in pitching the stupid ideas that our media have picked up and ran with, like domesticizing men and devaluing women to become more man like over the years was a clear attack on the defense of our nation.  As we look at the massive amounts of short courage in standing up for ourselves in the face of great evil regarding this election fraud issue alone, and the bullying that has been evident by corrupt and stupid governors regarding Covid-19 one thing is clear, we have needed men to defend our country and great women to raise our families and we’ve had neither leaving America open to foreign attack and scandalous behavior unchecked.  And for me it all starts with gun ownership.  Sadly, many young men and women these days have forgotten the value of a good gun and what it does for the psyche of boys and men everywhere and that at its most primal function has been the means for how China and their puppets in politics and the media have felt so confident in conducting plots of American destruction openly now in the light of day, and its been reprehensible. 

In the video above I provide several examples of why guns and gun ownership are positives specifically for young men.  Part of the plot to feminize men has been to conquer them more easily as China has planned their attack for a long time.  They didn’t want any resistance so with the same audacity that they sought to cheat in our 2020 election, they have been trying to convince men that defending their nation, and their women was a futile and stupid concept.  They also wanted to de-emphasize the need to learn combat and self-defense so that when they were attacked or were throttled in the street by some Antifa thug, that they wouldn’t know how to fight back. And like a bunch of dummies, culturally, certainly not in my household, we listened to their dumb asses.  I grew up knowing many good men who all had guns.  My grandparents had farms, real farms and on Thanksgivings, especially when I was young after dinner, we went out shooting in the field in the stark cold air.  It was for me an initiation into manhood, a way to teach the young the secrets of masculinity and of guarding the valor of a family.  It was a code of honor to learn about different guns and how they shot, how much power had to be controlled while shooting.  Guns just as is featured in the yearly classic Christmas movie, A Christmas Story, are the centerpiece of American civilization, especially in the life of men.  Women aren’t excluded, but typically women in traditional families like to talk about food and feeding the men in their lives, while men went out shooting together to work up an appetite for dessert once they returned inside.  And America was strong and dumb little attackers both foreign and domestic weren’t trying to overthrow the nation, because they would have been shot and killed for attempting it.

Women have their menstrual cycles to announce to them that they are changed from girls into sexually dangerous specimens who could give birth and start families of their own.  Men have almost no rituals to tell them how to manage their bigger, stronger bodies after puberty nor how to deal with their newly loaded guns in their reproductive organs.  Once boys become men with the ability to get a girl pregnant, the need to explain that danger to them is vital to the survival of any successful society.  It used to be that men respected women and they learned those basic skills by learning to shoot and master the techniques it took to handle firearms.  If boys learned how to handle guns and not kill other people in the process, they were more prepared to not stick their penises into every girl who would let them and not start families they weren’t prepared to support with a lifelong commitment.  And we can look around today and see what progressives have done to young men.  Boys today are totally disconnected from consequences because nobody has taught them how to manage danger.  Today sex is without consequence and overly coddled young men are completely devoid of the basic skills it takes to run a family, or to be in a relationship with a woman and the children of their life.  In many ways, it does all start with learning gun ownership in America.

Repeating what I said about men I knew when I was young, they all owned and used guns, not a single one out of many dozens ever shot anybody, or robbed a store, or behaved in bad ways.  All of them held responsible jobs, conducted themselves with care understanding the power they had as men, being stronger, more aggressive by nature than women typically are, the guns in their lives taught them the code of conduct for which to live.  It also taught them when it was necessary to stand up to bad people, whether it was at a trustee meeting, or a school board meeting, or some other local government event.  Gun ownership and the reminder of them hanging on a gun rack in their bedroom, or next to their bed emphasized that if justice was to be administered in life, it had to come from them, not some government losers looking for a payday out of China as we have today.  Guns have always been the centerpiece of an advanced culture because it brought forth in the men of that culture a sense of purpose and ownership that solidified constitutional principles. 

So it is in that context that we should know that political enemies of America have been seeking to destroy that relationship in preparation for their great, planned conquest.  They wanted to convince men that Bruce Jenner could put on a dress and be just another one of the girls while public schools are suspending the young boys in school for make the shape of a gun with their hands and play shooting with other boys on the playground.  That school officers and police are now being called if a teacher sees a child on a video conference who has a Nerf gun hanging on the wall behind them and designating them as a menace to society.  You can have sex and be taught all kinds of perversions in the 3rd grade these days, but if a school or any progressive learns that you bought a child a Red Ryder BB gun, then it is assumed the state has a right to destroy that family with government oversight.  And if there are some men who want to take the young boys out shooting, the are now considered terrorists, if the governors of our states even let us have Thanksgiving or Christmas due to Covid-19.  So, you see dear reader what has happened and how we arrived here.  We let progressives and foreign attackers set our gun policy and define for us what it took to be a man, and they screwed up and turned our society into cowards, and child delinquent monsters more at home in the Clockwork Orange than as heads of families and productive American citizens.  And its been reprehensible to watch, especially in the wake of great constitutional tragedy and a time where more strong people are needed from both sexes to rise to the occasion of our times and to defend us from foreign invasion.  There hasn’t been anybody there to hold the line because instead of grabbing guns to defend ourselves from aggression, the modern men are getting their hair done and picking out panties at Wal-Mart to replace the ones they soiled after the latest news broadcast scaring them to death over the next made-up pandemic by the CDC. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior
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