Tag: Vaquero

The Accuracy of Shooting from the Hip: A Cowboy Fast Draw update

I don’t really feel like writing about another terrorist attack, or the stupidity of Democrats.  In America, especially among the shooting sports, we have a means of dealing with both and that insanity is completely avoidable.  I’m talking about the Cowboy Way which is an evolved philosophy of conduct born from the notion of individual freedom and property rights defense—and its very unique to the world.  By day, I get the opportunity professionally to deal with a variety of international cultures and through my love of mythology I have a means of gaining more understanding than the typical person visiting an airport in Tokyo might experience.  For a good culture to survive or even thrive, you have to know what you are—and in America at the heart of our fundamental philosophy is the Cowboy Way.  To be a part of it, or to understand it in some fundamental way, becoming involved in a shooting sport of some kind will usually evoke the basic elements.  That is why for the last two years I have been learning a new skill—Cowboy Fast Draw.  Well, it has taken a little time and a lot of investment but I’m getting ready to do a little competition shooting so I was taking some video of my form to slow down and analyze, and I thought I’d share that video so that my readers can have an understanding of something I think is important.  I’ve set up a target range for Cowboy Fast Draw in my garage and it’s where I go to dump away stress and to fine tune a mild obsession for me in the realm of speed and accuracy.  How fast can a person really shoot and hit a target in the micro seconds of judgment?  Before I elaborate, here is a bit of my practice session from Friday evening this past week.  I like the results, but in all honesty, I’m pushing to be twice as fast as what is seen in this video.  These shots are in the .450 to .470 range—which is pretty good.  But not where I want to be.  However, what matters most is the experience of developing the Cowboy Way through this art and that is truly something very special.

Working with the western arts for over 25 years as a bull whip artist I often ran into these quick draw guys and I always enjoyed watching them.  But time and the initial investment to get started were certainly barriers of entry.  There are a number of different fast draw organizations out there and most of them were pretty loose and hadn’t really done anything to advance the sport in a way that was respectable.  That is until I learned more specifically about the CFDA, (Cowboy Fast Draw Association).  They had their act together and from what I could tell was doing great things in advancing the concept of the Cowboy Way.

Around this time of getting started in Cowboy Fast Draw I was involved in two international cultures professionally, one in Japan where the samurai is still very important to their business climate.  And the other was in Europe where the virtues of the Crusades and King Author’s adventures as a knight of the Round Table are the soil that all their roots emerge from.  I couldn’t help but think that for America to really mature into its own thing—which is essentially where we are—we needed to embrace our own philosophic—warrior past and roll it into our business culture.  In a tremendous way, Hollywood had already done that and our society flourished enormously during the 1930s to the 1960s when movie and television westerns were most of what Hollywood put out. A lot of the movies made in this period I was surprised to learn were shown on television in Europe and Japan as they were fascinated with the idea of the American cowboy and the values which poured forth from it.  Recently while staying in England for an extended period I counted at least five television channels that were showing American westerns during a Saturday afternoon—and they were old westerns.  Nothing produced within the last five decades.

Additionally I was coming under a lot of criticism for my very reckless ways of doing things—or what appeared to slow minded people as reckless.  I often get accused for “shooting from the hip” as if that were some kind of bad thing by rivals.  This is in reference to my tendency to make decisions on my own—without a lot of group involvement, and to make those decisions quickly.  I don’t sleep on much but instead usually draw and fire at that moment.  To me it doesn’t seem so fast, but that’s because I’m already thinking in a very fast way so what might seem like forever to me is very fast to the people watching from the outside.  So I got involved in Cowboy Fast Draw for other reasons too, and that was to prove that you could draw and fire from the hip quickly and accurately and that it wasn’t so reckless—but rather quite precise.

The safe thing for me would be to not get involved in this type of thing.  After all, I had been one of the best bull whip artists in the world and I had often used my experience with that endeavor to explain many complicated business concepts—such as putting out the flame on a candle with the crack of a whip like I did for the SB5 Bill before Governor Kasich went to the dark side and was still trying to do good work in Ohio, to demonstrate how to cut fat out of the budget with precision.  To hit a specific target with the tip of a bull whip is difficult and not many  people in the world can do it—but I can and I could use that calling card forever and nobody would blame me. Taking up Cowboy Fast Draw and joining a sport that already has so many lightening fast people competing in it doesn’t make much sense to most because it’s harder to be unique in such a field, if that is what you are going for in life.  Yet for me it’s about the things that happen in a fraction of a second that sends my mind ablaze with wonder, and obsession.

I hit a major milestone with some of my professional work a few years back and came into some expendable cash so that’s when I bought my fast draw rig and my new Ruger Vaquero.  The very first thing I did, because I had been thinking of it for over twenty years, was find a fast draw organization that I could join up with and master the art.  That’s when I noticed that the Cowboy Fast Draw Association really had everything figured out—the targeting system you could buy from them and it came all ready to set up and use and the ammunition was easy to get.  The wax bullets I get for a good price from CFDA and the shotgun primers I get at Cabela’s about every few weeks in boxes of 1000. To get good at something like Cowboy Fast Draw you have to practice a lot and to do that you have to get the economics lined up correctly.  The way they have things set up in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association it costs about .06 per shot.  To get to where you see me in the video above I have fired about 10,000 rounds at the target shown which is about $600 of investment in ammunition which might sound like a lot, but for shooting it really isn’t.  It’s almost as cheap as BB gun shooting, but Cowboy Fast Draw is much better.  By the time I get to my next 10,000 shots, I will likely get my times down by .100 of a second.  Perhaps by the next 50,000 shots, I may even do better than that.  If you watch the video in slow motion taken from many angles, the areas for improvement are the time reacting to the light and the time from drawing the gun and actually pulling the trigger. We are all taught that the way to shoot is to aim with the targeting bead carefully so the tendency to get the gun out in front of you is very instinctual.  But to get the fast times you really need to fire right out of the holster.  When I bought that holster I commissioned it from Bob Mernickle who makes holsters specifically to the stringent rules of the Cowboy Fast Draw Association just to be safe, and I have to say that it is my favorite thing in the world.  When I come home from a hard day, nothing feels better than putting on my fast draw rig and practicing a little fast draw.  There really isn’t anything better in the world than the smell of gun smoke, Hoppes gun cleaner, and finely worked leather to the sounds of talk radio giving you the news of the day.  I’ve had a very good life and I have owned many things that made me very happy, but my fast draw rig and the Ruger Vaquero that rest in it is the best thing I’ve ever owned. There is great symbolic meaning which is very important to me patriotically as well as philosophically that come with them.

Until I shot that video the other day I wasn’t sure how I was doing.  I didn’t worry about the form or how it looked; I just practiced with an eye on being able to compete within a few years.  I talked about it here when I started and I have been having fun with it.  I was pretty happy with the video I saw.  Everything happens so fast that it’s difficult to tell what is going on until you slow things down for analysis.  But so far so good, and I share it just in case some of my readers out there want to use it as an entry point into the sport for themselves. It’s an all American past time and just the function of it is important to the philosophic development of the Cowboy Way which is something everyone would do well to learn—especially young people. Other cultures—especially the Japanese, certainly are proud of their artistic warrior arts which put their societies on the map of relevancy.  In America, gunfighting is a martial art of our own invention and I think it’s time we embrace it—formally, not just in old movies.  Cowboy Fast Draw is a great way to do that.  You can practice at your own home relatively cheaply and it really gets you close to the spirit of America.  For me, it’s that quest to show how accurate a person can be shooting from the hip.  As those who have been so critical of my way of thinking about most all things, the proof that it’s possible is obvious.  But I’m not done yet.

Rich Hoffman

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My New Ruger Vaquero: A best friend that brings out the best in humanity

There is nothing about my new Ruger Vaquero .45 that speaks of violence to me. Looking at it all I think about is cowboy trick shooting and stunts that can be performed with it. It is to me equivalent to a nicely made basketball intended to be thrown into a net by a good athlete, or a wonderful pair of golf clubs meant to drive a ball across a vast green into a hole 400 yards away in increments.   Shooting with the Vaquero shown in the picture is essentially a sport where science and skill combine into hitting a target under timed circumstances. There is nothing violent about the act whatsoever. Guns might have been invented out of war like necessity and the sport of shooting to practice for that eventuality—but the sport of shooting is just another human endeavor intended to test skill against adversity with the drama of competition to drive image

What struck me on this particular gun—as they all do these days is the nice messaging that often comes with them. Ruger in this case was grateful for my purchase and the supplied literature made it clear. It showed to me a serious interest by the Ruger Company to build a solid base of customer support for a product unquestionably made in America by good, hard working people. The gun feels like a well-crafted work of art, its machining is immaculate, the tolerances on its critical junctures well inspected, and it feels incredibly competent. This is not a company that should be targeted by liberal hate groups. Ruger is not a company making death—it makes life, and tradition. There is nothing about my Ruger Vaquero that speaks of violence if a person really understands what shooting is all about in the world of sport. It’s a fine tool to me for exhibiting traditional American art forms, and it’s a miracle of modern science—more sophisticated than driving a golf ball into a hole, or throwing a football 50 yards down field into the arms of a waiting receiver. To me the Vaquero by Ruger is the ultimate individual sport where great power is incorporated into the mechanisms of great engineering and it deserves to be respected as such.

But it’s not lost to me how grateful the Ruger Company is with each purchase made of their firearms. It is because of their attitude toward their customers that I get a special feeling whenever I see the emblem blazed across a t-shirt of hat, or on a banner at a competition. I know they care about their customers in spite of a world led by liberals that wants to eradicate them from the face of the planet because those political minds want to make the company into a representation of hate and violence. Football is a violent sport, golf clubs are sometimes used as weapons of hate when they are slammed over the head of a victim, but political advocates don’t seek to ban golf courses or the sport of golf. The gun has a special hatred aimed at it because liberals have no idea or desire to understand that guns like the Vaquero are designed for much more than hunting or self defense—they are built for the sport of the Cowboy Fast Draw.

In such groups as those in the preservation of the Wild West arts are some of the best people I have ever met. The world would be a whole lot better off if more people interacted with these great Americans. And on the hips of most of them are often Vaqueros by Ruger. They wear them openly in public often and nobody ever gets shot, and there are seldom ever hard words spoken to others. There is almost always respect for their fellow shooters. Within that alliance of sportsman they revere each other with camaraderie that is exceptionally healthy and overwhelmingly positive.

When I picked up my Vaquero at Right 2 Arms it was the owner’s parents who were working the store and were armed behind the counter. There was no reason to feel apprehension at that visible support of what looked like a Glock holstered on the father. We proceeded to have a very nice conversation about Gatlinburg, Tennessee while the background check came through for me. They were good people and I looked over my Vaquero as they spoke about their upcoming vacation plans. It was good, healthy conversation among highly armed people who invoked no danger whatsoever. Instead, the presence of guns elevated our interaction to something of respectful banter united under support for the 2nd Amendment.

Just two days prior I had a wonderful lunch with some VIP’s within the shooting world. We talked about gun ranges, plans for helping the youth through learning marksmanship, and the bad rap that guns were getting in the wake of the Oregon shooting.   I enjoyed the company more than I would if the conversation were a usual business lunch where all the things that people really like are talked around because of political correctness. With these guys, we could all just be ourselves which was refreshing. It was much better to talk about things that really interested us instead of sports scores and the season trajectory of our favorite football teams. There always is a solid foundation of realness that comes from those types of lunches as opposed to others that feel like a clip on tie at a wedding. It confirmed much of what I have been feeling lately about firearms and their role behind the American experience. We need to be more proud of that heritage, not less so.

I mentioned to the guys at the power lunch that we needed to market firearms differently as a public perception—that as shooters we needed to stop riding the ropes of the obvious political fights we are without question in. We need to get into the center of the ring and control the fight from that position instead of just taking the shots to the face and hoping to outlast our opponents—the gun grabbers, the liberal radicals teaching in our public schools, and the political class that wants to turn America back into an aristocracy similar to Europe—instead of one founded on independence from gun possession.

The reason my Vaquero as opposed to other guns I have bought is so special is that its purpose is exclusively for use as a cowboy shooter for the sport of Western Arts. It is the type of single action that won the West in America and that means a lot to me symbolically, and the sports that have risen up in the wake of that historical memory is not much different from the battlefield strategies of football. The games might have been invented by inclinations of war, but they evolve into camaraderie and tradition that brings out the best that a society has to offer. The gun in America exhibits the best of this example.

The summation of my contacts the week that I picked up my Vaquero at Right 2 Arms is guns make people better—not worse as progressive politics suggests. The political left had misdiagnosed the root cause of human evil and sold it back to society in a package of deceit. When that deceit is removed and Americans are allowed to wear their firearms on their hips, and discuss them as extensions of themselves, a higher quality in people emerges built out of respect. The knowledge that domination of the another person is not possible—so a respectful exchange emerges between human beings when both have guns. The trouble emerges when that relationship is lopsided, where a maniac is armed and a peaceful person is not—that’s where abuse happens. But Ruger is not about feeding that fear—they are about making America a better place and that sentiment begins with the simple thank you note that they package with their guns. I felt honored to open up my new Vaquero. It’s an honor to have such a fine gun from such a quality company. As is typical of most gun manufacturers, they are examples of what’s best about American manufacturing and that is certainly the case with Ruger. They are one of the very best, and every time I look at my Ruger Vaquero, I will think of what’s best about America and the culture that should otherwise thrive in a society open to gun use for the skills that emerge from them in sports.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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