What happened at the 86 World shoot? What kind of crazy courses of fire were there that required you to holster a loaded gun during the stage?
There was a situation where a competitor discharged a round into his leg upon reholstering uner pressure of the shot timer. USPSA rule 8.2.5 states
"A course of fire must never require the competitor to re-holster a handgun after the start signal...."
I was not on the USPSA board at the time of the initial policy change, but I did vote to approve the most recent rulebook, and did not object to this rule, so those who dislike can direct blame in my direction.
Consider a major match - you have 200-300 competitors; various skill levels; and holsters ranging from race specialty holsters to street worthy carry rigs. There is a very real safety risk of pressuring competitors to attempt to "speed holster" under the stopwatch - and yes, there will be pressure when the other competitors in your division will be doing speed holstering. Sure, allowing reholstering would make some stages more interesting - but I don't think it's worth it.
Re-holstering is something that should be done slowly and carefully. It's virtually unheard of for persons in civilian self defense situations to have to speed holster and give chase, so we're not losing any "realism" for the kind of situations in which the competitor's sidearm will reasonably be called upon to be used in defensive deployment.
On the other hand, you can count on my to oppose any restrictions in stage design that appeal to political correctness.
IPSC has discouraged the use of scenarios in describing stages; moved towards a PC non-headed target (something they denies when they introduced it as "separate but equal" - but proceeded to first remove the traditional target from the rulebook, and then disallow it in all IPSC matches); requested the Phillipine hosts of a world shoot take stage diagrams off the web since they prevented certain competitors from obfuscating the nature of the sport in which they engaged; and came up with the silly assertion that the use of various sized pepper poppers was simulating children (they are used to simulate distance, not children or cannabilistic pygmies).
A big part of the bifurcation between USPSA and IPSC was driven by the increasing pressure to place the PC game by IPSC, and the lack of a desire on the part of US shooters to start watering down the sport in the hopes that some anti gunner would react with "See, they use bland targets on boring stages ... I guess we don't need to push for gun bans after all since what really bothered us was the targets, not the civilian possession of firearms".
![[wink]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/002.gif "Wink [wink]")
