The belief that making practice or regulation (“regulation” at least for NRA Precision Pistol matches; however, not NRA Police Pistol Combat matches, which still require factory ammunition for their “DR” event) NRA Distinguished Revolver or CMP Service Revolver ammunition seemingly has been met with the usual shooter’s modus operandi: skepticism in the perceived quality of devices one must have in order to be able to get the required job done. This particular thought is not new, or limited to shooting. Many believe that if they had just the right piece of equipment, regardless of what it is or importance of function, they’d be able to accomplish whatever task it is that is in front of them; or if not accomplish it, approach it easier, faster, or even enable themselves to look good while missing the mark, whatever it is.

And, to be fair, when an event that requires a different tack from what is the normal course of business, it’s an easy cognitive jump into believing that your equipment must somehow be defective and seemingly restraining expected results when you don’t seem to perform to what you consider your average score when using similar sorts of equipment in what is an otherwise usual way.

Of course, this is starting to move into the “a poor craftsman blames his tools,” territory, isn’t it? And no person likes to have that particular charge leveled at them, or even to believe it of themselves (which most cannot do).

So, what’s a shooter to do? How do you determine if your equipment truly falls short and is holding you back, or, if it is in fact operator error? Especially in light of a shooting event that comes up but just a few times a year? One must split apart the shooter from the equipment and test them separately from each other. That seems simple enough- but remember, there is no objective test of a shooter other than performance over time, measured in some quantitative way (e.g. score). It’s much easier to test equipment, but unlike shooting itself which is fun and interesting, testing is a chore, subject to the imprecision humans bring to any process.

The genesis of this site is born of the fraught complexity that revolver shooting naturally brings in an age of semi-autos. The goal is simple: document as much as possible about this kind of shooting for this very narrow subject. This site is built on GitHub Pages, and the information collected will live in a repository for all to be able to use. Feel free to make a pull request if you would like to contribute.