Caleb Giddings Joins Team Cheaper Than Dirt!

We’re proud to announce today our sponsorship of well known IDPA competitor Caleb Giddings.

Caleb Giddings made a name for himself with his performances shooting Enhanced Service Revolver in IDPA competition as well as his 2010 appearance as a contestant on the History Channel’s reality TV show “Top Shot”. Caleb comes to Cheaper Than Dirt! from the National Rifle Association where he worked as an election coordinator. Caleb has been shooting since he was 8 years old. It was in the US Coast Guard Academy on the collegiate pistol team where he first found that he had more than just a knack for shooting. As a bull’s-eye pistol shooter Caleb laid the foundation for his move into action pistol shooting. His performances at area and national matches regularly place him with some of the best shooters in the nation.

Among his peers Caleb is considered to be a major up-and-coming competitor. He was the 2009 IDPA Indiana State Champion and has the potential to make a serious showing at the 2011 IDPA Nationals. When asked about the partnership Caleb had this to say: “I’m proud to be sponsored by Cheaper than Dirt! Their commitment to supporting the shooting sports at both the local and the national level is fantastic. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to spread that support to both new and experienced shooters!”

Giddings will be doing more than just letting his shooting performance do the talking. In addition to being a talented shooter he is also a published writer for Shooting Illustrated and other major publications. Readers of this blog can look forward to feature articles from Caleb with shooting tips, firearm reviews, as well as ammunition testing and evaluation.

Caleb went on to discuss upcoming ammunition reviews: “Testing ammo is an opportunity that has me fired up. For competitive shooters, hunters, and concealed carry permit holders it’s extremely important that the ammunition you choose for the job be able to deliver the right performance. Whether it’s making a clean kill on a game animal, making the perfect hit on the x-ring, or protecting your family, I’m thrilled to be testing ammunition from Cheaper Than Dirt and helping the shooting community to make informed decisions about their ammo.”

Please join us in welcoming Caleb to Team Cheaper Than Dirt!

John Gangel on Collector Grade Firearms

To say that John Gangel man is a wealth of knowledge would be a massive understatement. Mr. Gangel has been collecting antique firearms for the better part of 50 years and knows the industry inside and out. He was gracious enough to speak at length with us about his background in firearms and give us some insights into fine gun and antique firearm collecting.

When did you first get started collecting firearms? Well, I got interested in firearms in the late 1960s actually. I had a few guns before that, but in the late 1960s I got interested in antique firearms and basically pursued that end and I've been with it ever since.

Tell us a bit about your first collectors piece. What was the first gun you ever truly fell in love with? Oh, well my first decent guns were when I had a little moving business. I was in my teens and I traded a move to an elderly lady. I moved her household and traded her for a few old Winchesters and found out that Winchesters sold pretty good. I started concentrating and buying and selling antique guns and that was in about 1969 or 1970.

The first gun I really fell in love with I would say was serial number 1 Texas Paterson which was the first Colt that was ever made and I had it in my collection from 1975 to 1993.

Obviously it took a number of years for you to acquire your knowledge of antique firearms. Did you attend a lot of auctions or did you work inside the industry to gain that knowledge? Yes, all of the above. Basically I traveled to gun shows for many years. I worked in the firearm business. My first business partner was a man named Moe Gruensky at the Musket and Saber in Costa Mesa and I started with him full time in 1969. In 1974 I opened a place called the Antique Arms Locker in Pasadena and in 1975 I opened a business called The Arms Cellar and I had that both of those places from 1975 until early 1990s.

I went into business with a gentleman named Bob Ells from Ells Fargo in 1974 and I was with him until 1979. At one time I had three gun shops in Southern California, one antique and two modern.

So you were doing business in California this entire time? I've been in business in California since 1969.

Tell me a bit about working in that atmosphere. California is not exactly friendly toward gun shops and firearm dealers, even if they do deal in antiques. It definitely is difficult. You have to pay attention and you have to dot the i's and cross the t's and if it's any fun it's not legal in California if it's a gun.

We had a lady come in this morning with a paratrooper carbine that was mint and original and hard to find and I had to tell her that "you can't sell it and you have to take the stock off the gun. It's OK to have the gun and it's OK to have the stock but you can't have the stock on the gun because it's an assault rifle."

She asked "Why is that?" and I had to tell her "That's the way they say it is."

So you were collecting these fine guns for some time before opening up Little John's Auction Service. Well, you know I was selling guns professionally as a dealer and we opened up Little John's Auction Service in 1978 and I've been auctioning fine firearms since then.

...and of course at some point you branched out into other non-firearm collectibles and antiques as well. Yes. Basically I've always concurrently dealt in paintings, fine arts, and antiques. The last 5 years I've moved my book of business in that field over to Prescott Arizona and I'm affiliated with Reata Pass Auctions which is run by my daughter Gabrielle, she's second generation. She sells a lot of the cars, antiques, fine art and antique furniture, porcelain collectibles and that sort of thing. I refer that business to her. I still have one auction a year here locally in Orange County which is my Christmas sale where I sell jewelry and antiques and other related items in what we'd call a "Collector's Auction" and we have one of those every year in December.

That keeps you on a pretty busy schedule then- We do 5 auctions a year and we have a gallery where we have private customers we sell to on a private basis. And then I travel to gun shows also. We kind of do it all.

You probably have to start working on the next auction as soon as the hammer falls on the last item then. That's exactly right. We're cataloging and taking consignments for our December sale right now.

How do you assemble all of these guns into lots and into a complete auction? Do you seek out the items or do consignees basically find you when they have a piece they want to sell? Basically, word of mouth is my best form of advertisement. A lot of other guys will advertise in the Wall Street Journal and other national magazines, but if they haven't heard of me in 40 years of doing business they've been living under a rock. I'm the auctioneer for the Colt Collector's Association, I'm the auctioneer for Winchester Collector's Organization, I'm the judge and the Winchester show and I'm the judge at the Colt show. I'm the auctioneer at Texas Gun Collectors and I'm the judge at Texas Gun Collectors. Pretty much I'm well known in the auction business.

I would definitely agree with that. In fact, let's talk about one of the many guns that became associated with your name. Back in 2003 you auctioned off a very famous gun, the one used to kill Jesse James. Yes, that's definitely one of the more famous guns. You know, it got national attention. It was well documented and so it did get a lot of play. I think when I sold Houston's Bowie knife and way back when I sold the Museum of Rock & Roll I probably got as much national attention, but that one really seemed to go around with the gun collectors.

It truly resonated, especially with the final price of $350,000 that it finally hammered away at. It's got to be exciting for you as an auctioneer to see these prices realized. Tell us a bit about how important the role of the auctioneer is in getting that price. Well, you know my advantage over the other guys is that I actually know what I'm selling. Most auctioneers are selling bushels of wheat and corn the day before and they don't really know one gun from the other. It's a big help for me when I'm actually auctioning the item off I actually know something about history, know the gun, normally know the guy who's going to buy it and know the guy it came from. Basically when I was able to sell the Houston Bowie knife for close to $400,000 what the difference was was knowing the history of the item and knowing how to make the history work in a short space of time in order to sell it.

The history is incredibly important when selling any antique. In the auction business you refer to it as provenance. How do you go about authenticating the provenance of these antiques? Well, it's a process basically. Sometimes you just can't, but I have a person on staff here whose name is John Robinson who is a retired Chief of the Sheriff's Department and is a good investigator and he's a collector himself of historic arms. The two of us investigate things quite diligently before we try to sell them because if we don't believe it we don't put it in our catalog.

You know, I'm very careful with how I word things and I'm very careful about how I describe things. Sometimes you just have to say that it's a story based on something Uncle Ed told Aunt Edna, and that has somewhat of a value but you have to tie it in.

There's a very interesting gun in this auction which I really like and Mr. Robinson really likes, and it's a shotgun that belonged to Jeff Milton, who was a famous Texas Ranger and a famous lawman. The provenance and history on it is really great. It came out of the collection of a man named John Wilson. John Wilson was a big collector who collected historic arms in the very early days. He was from New Mexico and Texas and had ranches in both New Mexico and Texas. He knew a lot of the very early collectors. His father and grandfather were collectors. His father actually knew Pancho Villa personally and basically almost anything from his collection that has that kind of history is really well received.

This shotgun is particularly interesting in that there is a letter from a man named Fallis who was a border patrol supervising agent in the area of Tucson and Jeff Milton worked for him, and it tells the story of how Jeff Milton gave him this gun. It's a nice story and it's good documentation that it came from Wilson and Fallis and these people existed and you can prove that. But what really authenticates it is that there are unpublished photographs of Milton with Fallis and then the one that really drives it home is the one of Milton sitting at the dinner table with Fallis and his wife. This was in his later years and he's sitting at the dinner table with them in their home and then there is a newspaper article during the same period of time that tells about Jeff Milton eating dinner with them in the home that was written in Tucson and was an interview with the wife in the 1940s telling about Jeff Milton.

That's the kind of thing you hope to get, you like to get, and you wish everything had. It's all a process of basically being able to prove these things. You have to prove them. You can't always prove them beyond any doubt but you have to basically establish a circumstantial and likely case. In the case of this Milton gun it's pretty hard to improve upon. You can't get much better than that.

There is also a companion revolver that goes with that shotgun, a Jeff Milton Colt Army Special. Right. It did come from the same place but see that won't bring a huge price because it isn't as well documented. It basically came along with the other gun, but that's all.

How do you make the decision what collections to break up into separate lots and what items to sell together as a set? Well you have to review it and you have to discuss it. Basically I get a second opinion, and I didn't think that the second piece was really important to the first piece. I didn't feel that it helped it that much, so I decided to separate it and sell it separately because the provenance and documentation on that is not as exacting as the other piece. It doesn't say that he used it, he had it and it's likely a gun that he picked up in his travels but not one likely that he used.

The history of these guns is really so important, and I think you'd agree that that is really what collectors are looking for is to own a piece of history. That's correct for a lot of collectors. Some collectors really don't care. The history collectors are into the history and then there are other guys who are into variations. Collecting is a broad myriad of many types of collectors. Some people could care less about history, they don't care.

Speaking of guns without much history, you've got one firearm in this auction that has never been used at all, a 1854 Volcanic carbine rifle that is still new in the box. It is, and it's in it's original box and it's the only one known to exist in this condition. Interestingly enough I thought that that gun had crossed my path years ago, but I couldn't remember it and an old time local collector here whose name is Doug Minnick, he's the maven of Winchester people here in the Southern California area. He was collecting fine Winchesters basically before I was born. I knew him very well. He was acquiring some very good Winchesters in the late '50s and early '60s and he was acquiring them mostly from a guy named Elmer Taylor, and Elmer Taylor had been collecting since the '40s and '50s. We both thought that Elmer Taylor had had this gun and we didn't think there was another one, but couldn't prove it. As it turns out I traced the ownership through about 6 owners over the last almost 50 years and sure enough it had been Elmer Taylors about 40 or 50 years ago.

You mentioned earlier that you got started collecting when you were a teen, and we've been discussing some of the more rare and higher priced firearms, but there are actually some inexpensive bargains to be found at your auction as well. Tell me a bit about them. Matter of fact there are a couple of pocket models in this auction that are inscribed from the Civil War that are really neat guns that have quite rare inscriptions on them and they are very historic and interesting and can be had for a few thousand dollars. And these guns are neat! I read the description of some of them 4 and 5 times and really liked them. There are a lot of other things that aren't terribly expensive that have a lot of history with them. Some of these dueling pistols, for goodness sake, the history on some of those dueling pistols is incredible.

So what you're saying is that anybody can get started collecting for less than the price of a modern rifle. Well, that's something that's really interesting. I know some guys who are spending $3000, $4000, even $5000 for a shooting gun that isn't anything special. Some of the high end shotguns cost $100,000 and more. You can really buy nice antique guns that have some history with them starting at about $400 or $500. It doesn't seem like an incredible amount of money.

For example, Philadelphia Derringers. Philadelphia Derringers have such intriguing history in America. One was used to kill Abraham Lincoln, they were used all during the frontier period and the Civil War period. They have tremendous association to San Francisco and the Barbary Coast and the Western Frontier, '49 and gold miners...

They're the American classic gun, the Derringer pistol, and you can still buy a nice Derringer for $1,500 and you can buy a very nice Derringer for $3,500 and you can buy a great one for $5,000. You know, we have 20 of them in this sale and I've been telling some of my customers that I think that Philadelphia Derringers are incredibly cheap and incredibly interesting. Especially when they have San Francisco Agent's marks on them, that means that they were sold here during the gold rush.

We see these prices vary greatly from year to year. How much of that is driven by buyer interest in a particular model? Well, we've had some price surges over the years that have leveled out. The most notable of what you're talking about is Henry rifles. Henry rifles went through the roof when [the movie] Dances With Wolves came out, and you know they've been going well for about 15 years. They finally got so expensive that they started to level out and have probably gone back down 10%. That was just a lot of hype I would say.

Colt single actions, high end engraved Colt single actions were being pushed very hard for the last about 10 years by about 3-4 very wealthy collectors. They started buying the late engraved single actions for as much as the early engraved single actions, and that was a phenomenon.

I was actually the first one to do it. I sold a late engraved single action for $125,000. It was made in the 1930s, and previous to that no one had seen a 1930s engraved single action break $50,000, or even $30,000. What that was was a couple of wealthy collectors who decided they were going to buy all of the mint engraved single actions that they could. They didn't care if they were 1937, 1930, or 1870, which they were wrong about.

What happened was that the market was pushed by these three guys, then one of the guys died, another guy quit collecting, another one passed away, and another guy got enough. So, the result of that was that whole bunch of them came up in an auction back east and most of them didn't even sell for half of what they had brought because that was a market that was being overly inflated by a few collectors. And you have to watch that. We haven't seen that dramatic of a thing in many years, and when we see that kind of dramatic uprise in things, like the real estate bubble, it is usually followed by a fall.

Presumably a shrewd collector who wanted to scoop up a good bargain on an antique firearm could do a little bit of learning and find out what is going on in the industry and hunt for some great deals. You're 100% right. I was just in Texas, and a very shrewd old buyer who's been at it for 40 years named Dr. Nick Shannon, who's been kind of the go-to guy for the last 40 years when you had a good engraved single action, was out of it for 3-4 years. He was a seller, and now that the prices have adjusted to where he feels comfortable and the prices are in his price range he's very shrewdly buying some.

That is one interesting thing about the collectors market and auctions in general is how the prices are set solely by how much one person desires something. There's no inherent value in the item itself. You know I often have testified and told people that there really isn't any price on unique history. It's just a willing buyer and a willing seller. I talked to a man once who bought a painting for a world record price that was five times what a painting of that type might bring and I asked him what made it worth that type of money.

He told me "It isn't worth anything. It doesn't have anything to do with worth. I'm a business man and what my accountants define as "worth" is how much there is for a return on an investment that I'm buying. There's no guaranteed return on [the painting as an] investment, there's no formula that I can factor. This is just a situation that this is how much money it costs for me to own this, and I have the money, so that's how much I'll pay for it. The fact that I paid five times the high that anyone felt this artist would bring has nothing to do with reality, it's just the price of ownership."

So, it all comes down to how much you're willing to pay to own a piece of history. That's it. There's no value on unique history. It's willing buyer and willing seller.

How does one participate in one of these auctions? I'm in Texas and not going to be able to travel to California for this auction, what options are there if another reader sees an item that they want to bid on? Well there are several ways. Most people will get a catalog, which we are very liberal in giving away. If a person requests a catalog and is a member of any club we send it to them for cost, and don't even charge them for the catalog in most cases. Our catalog is also online and we have online bidding through 3 or 4 providers like ProxyBid.com and iCollector.com etc. They can bid online through those forms of bidding or they can bid by phone or they can bid by sealed bid. We take sealed bids, phone bids, and internet bids.

Then we have a live group of people who generally show up. We have a huge crowd at our auctions, 500 bidders usually at a sale like this. Our auctions are held at a place called the Phoenix Club, which is the oldest German Club in Southern California and was started by the original immigrants to Anaheim. It's a beautiful club that has the best beer and German food, a very nice facility. We have the auctions at that location and they're very well attended. It's a fun deal.

Of course you don't have to be a bidder to attend do you? I just had a couple of guys in here today and I gave them a catalog and they were kind of apologetic and said "Well, we're not really buyers,"

And I said "Listen, one of the things I enjoy is that this is a hands-on museum. I like collectors who come out, look at the catalog and keep the catalog."

At this auction there were 1,600 guns that the guy had never seen. There are almost 150 dueling pistols. There are probably only 300-350 American dueling pistols in the United States of America by his estimate and mine. That's almost half that exist, and by far the best collection. Then the memorabilia is fantastic, letters written by Jackson about his duel is the only one in private hands, and other supporting documents are incredibly great. You couldn't go to any museum in the United States of America and see anything like this.

You bring up an interesting point on how educational these auctions can be. So many people these days aren't familiar with the history of our nation. Well, I'm trying to pass it on to other collectors and I have a vested interest, besides money, I like to start collectors. I like collectors, and I am a collector. I'm not in this solely for the money. You know I really enjoy collecting, that's why I'm in a lot of clubs. I donate a lot of money and a lot of time to helping most of the major clubs in the United States such as the NRA, the Texas Gun Collectors, the Colt Collectors Association and the Winchester Collectors Association, because I want to see collecting go on. It is a fraternity, I'm aware of that, and what I try to do particularly in my catalog is have a research quality catalog.

I think that that's very important. I look at a lot of gun catalogs and basically the descriptions are terrible. They bear no resemblance to the gun whatsoever. They're done by people who aren't gun people, have no appreciation of history, and don't understand what they sell. I think if you read my catalog, after reading it you could say basically that the person who wrote this knows what he's looking at and knows about history.

What can we do to encourage the next generation of, not just collectors, but firearm enthusiasts? Give them books and catalogs and tell them to read, because once they read the story of America and once they see the American firearms and once they get that bug of reading the history, like I have a book on the life of Robert Hall who is one of the great Texas Rangers. I've had probably more Texas Ranger stuff than almost anyone. I've owned Ben McCulloch's gun, I've owned some of the best Texas Rangers stuff there are. I sold Houston's Bowie knife. I was able to buy a frontiersman's outfit that was Robert Hall's, who was one of the great early Texas Rangers along with a powder horn that was presented to him by Sam Houston. It's documented by a book written on his life in the 1890s where it is pictured. It's one of the best things I've ever owned. I just displayed it in Texas.

What was so much fun for me, and a bunch of other people, I had never read this book on Robert Hall and I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable party, not an expert on the Texas Rangers, but a very knowledgeable party. I've read hundreds of books on the Texas Rangers and by buying this outfit and the horn I also got the book with it and there was a completely new dimension to the Texas Rangers written by a man in the 1890s who was right there. There was a lot of information in there that I hadn't previously known, and there's a great little anecdotal story in there about how Hall and Bigfoot Wallace were invited at the 50 year Centennial of Texas in 1886. In 1886 the Texans started having appreciation for their history because it was 50 years since the Texas Revolution and they had a big series of shindigs, events and things and they invited Wallace and Hall to this big event.

They showed up there and they were dressed like frontiersmen and everyone was really enthusiastic about hearing them speak. The announcer asked them to say a few words and give a speech and they looked at each other and said "We can't speak, we're not professional speakers" and the announcer asked them "Well, what can you do?" and they replied "Go get a couple of fiddlers, we're going to show you how we dance."

So, they went and got a couple of fiddlers and they told them that on the frontier they learned to dance from the Indians and that the guys on the frontier would dance like the old frontiersmen at the rendezvous in the hills. So they got out and they had this big shindig and they had thousands of people cheering. To this day this is remembered as these guys doing this hoe-down with fiddles playing and entertaining thousands of people at the Centennial of Texas. It's just a great story.

Tell me about some of the guns that you've had that you didn't have a complete history on that later turned out to have a rich and surprising story behind them. There is one in particular right off the top of my head was a Texas Paterson that had belonged to a Texas Ranger named Lowe. There are only a couple of Texas Patersons that are dedicated to Texas Rangers and this one was in really poor condition. It was probably the poorest condition Texas Paterson that I ever had, but it had absolutely impeccable history as belonging to a Ranger named Lowe.

I had it for a little while until one of my friends talked me out of it. I really did a little bit of research, not too much, and I sold it to a guy who was a great researcher. I was out driving in Texas and for some reason had decided to pull over at this historical marker out in the boonies on the east side of Texas heading into Louisiana. As I pulled in I saw "Grave site of a Texas Ranger" and it was Lowe's grave site.

It told the whole story of about him and how he'd been a pioneer in the area and how he'd been an Indian fighter and so on and so forth. So I called the friend of mine who I sold this to and told him "Look, I found Lowe".

We had known a little bit about him, but not very much, but there was the whole story and it was just by luck that I pulled into his resting place just because I saw a historical marker.

You really do have a wealth of knowledge on these firearms and their history... You know, I write a book every time I do a catalog. My latest catalog was about 360,000 words. A pocket book that you buy in the airport is generally 60,000-90,000 words. That's basically 3-3.5 books here and I'm going to do another one in May of next year. My books are my catalogs.

It must be difficult to condense such rich histories down into a small paragraph or two. Well, my editor is my wife. A lot of it ends up on the cutting room floor if it becomes too long winded. Sometimes you have a tendency to over prevaricate.

Much of the provenance and authentication materials, letters and such, get sold with the firearm. We're very conscious with trying to keep the provenance. As I said, I've got a researcher on staff who is much more diligent about it than I am. He's written a lot of articles for magazines and he's a collector. His job is to help me with the provenance and help me to maintain the paperwork and provenance. For this auction we have 5 or 6 huge boxes filled with history and provenance that go with the Orbello collection.

It's very important to keep that all, and I think most collectors that are out there realize that I am really cognizant of keeping the history and provenance with the material and I really make an effort to really stay with it. Unfortunately sometimes I've been in to some collections where collectors got old or they got a little bit sloppy when they got sick and some paperwork got discarded here or there.

In some cases it just becomes too voluminous. I was just taking care of Tom Seymour's estate and Tom Seymour started collecting in the 1950s and collected for 50 years and he never threw anything away. It was thousands of pieces of paper. It was a truckload of research and basically we just took about the last 10 boxes and just auctioned it off at the Texas Gun Collectors show and one fellow decided that it was going to be his job to go through all of this and try to get it to the right people. He'd maintain it until he could find some people who could sift through it and basically try to get it to people who knew about it, because some of it was important.

That's a very good point about what happens when people come into this by inheriting an existing collection, or even just a few antique firearms. So many people don't know how to maintain these collections or care for the firearms, I'm sure you've had some heart wrenching experiences coming across an exquisite piece that was "cleaned up". I've had some bad experiences like that. We had a local gun smith here, and I won't use his name, but he was a local gunsmith and he knew nothing about antique guns. All he cared about was trying to make a few hundred dollars on every gun that walked in his store.

I had appraised a very fine Kentucky rifle for a woman in a retirement community that was made by Albright. Albright was a man who carved stocks on Kentucky rifles very beautifully with animals in high relief. It's very rare, and he was as good a carver as some of the European carvers of the 18th and 19th century. It was a beautiful gun and was in untouched original condition.

I had a close friend whose name is Walter O'Connor who is probably the premier expert on early Americana. In my opinion he is since Bill Guthman died. Walter and I were willing to pay for the gun at the time, and this was many years ago, $25,000. We're going back probably 20 years here. We told the lady all this and left her with an offer and about 7 years go by and I happened to go into this gun shop in Souther California and hanging on the wall was a Kentucky rifle. I asked them to take it down and they took it down and I recognized it instantly as the Albright Kentucky rifle that I had appraised.

There aren't very many of them and this one had a carving of a deer jumping over a log on the left side. The gun had been completely refinished and sanded down to where the carving was indistinct, where you could barely make out where the carving had originally been. The gun had been completely shined to a high finish. The metal had been refinished and the brass had been polished. The name was ground almost off. It looked like a brand new reproduction and the guy who showed it to me was so proud of his work he said "Yeah, I told the lady that this will bring $30,000 now that I've cleaned all of the crap off of it," and I was ejected from the place for telling him that he took a great treasure and turned it into nothing. It wasn't worth $3,000 after what he did to it.

If somebody does inherit a collectors piece, an antique gun, or even just an older firearm they feel may be worth something, how do they properly care for it? Restoration is restoration, but most people who repair guns are not qualified to be restorers. A general rule of thumb is never to do too much, and in most cases do nothing. Myself personally, when I get guns I do almost no restoration because everyone has a different idea of restoration. I just make them work.

Collectors love and will pay for original dirt. Patina is very important. What is patina? Patina is essentially original dirt. People really like the original dirt on a gun.

That rust and corrosion are often what give a gun its character. Still, it's not like we want to encourage more rust or damage. What precautions should a collector take to preserve their firearms? Guns love good oil. With all of the synthetic products that we wrap these guns in, you go and buy a boot or a case for a gun and it has a synthetic interior when you put some of these new products on the guns they can react with the linings of these cases and cause pitting and rust.

I have guns I paid a million dollars for and I've handled the finest guns in the world. The best way is to just oil it and wrap it in a cotton T-shirt, towel, or sock. I have guns that I put away 25 years ago and they're still perfect wrapped in a cotton towel. You just take them, unwrap them and oil them once or twice a year and they're perfect.

There's a terrible story about Frank Singer, who was one of the biggest collectors in America, and he went and bought some of this fancy oil and put his guns in these sheepskin lined boots and there was a reaction between the oil and the sheepskin because of the humidity in the safe where they were stored and it did $500,000 worth of damage to his fine Colt collection. He was insured and he proved it in a court of law that the chemical reaction occurred.

Well, I appreciate the time you've taken to talk to us today. You're a wealth of information. What I'm here for is to learn more. Every auction I do, I learn more. This auction was fantastic for me because I learned more about dueling pistols. I thought I knew a lot until I had this collection and met the man who collected it. He spent 40 years learning it and now I've spent 4 or 5 months learning it and it's really been a joy in my opinion just to handle this merchandise.

One of the important thing in collecting is to get a couple of good mentors. There are people in the business who are very knowledgeable. A guy starting out alone should always get a second or third opinion and the older guys who have been collecting a long time will always help the younger guys.

Join a collectors club or collectors association. If you live in Texas, join the Texas Gun Collectors Association, it's the best collectors club in the country. I've been a member for 40 years and there isn't a better group of guys. The show is a hoot and the guys are great.

John Gangel is the owner of Little John's Auction Service and his next auction is October 27th-28th in Orange California. You can browse through the listings in the up coming auction here on the Shooter's Log where we've broken the lots into three groups: Lots 1-450, Lots 451-900, and Lot 901-1500b.

We Talk To Phil Strader at the IDPA Nationals in Tulsa Oklahoma

Phil Strader got his start with firearms when he first hired on as a police officer in Danville Virginia. After seeing a video of action pistol shooter Jerry Barnhart, Phil decided that if he was to take his responsibilities as a law enforcement officer seriously, he would have to practice more and improve his gun handling skills.

Thus began his path toward becoming a world renowned action pistol shooter and professional firearms instructor. Phil Strader is now a Smith & Wesson sponsored shooter and regularly competes in IPSC and IDPA. When he's not participating in action pistol competitions, Phil runs his own military and law enforcement training company Straighter Solutions.

We had the chance to catch up with Phil at the IDPA National Championship competition held last week at the US Shooting Academy in Tulsa Oklahoma and talked with him for a bit about his move to the Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm Pro.

Let's talk about the equipment you're using today. What did you bring with you? I'm shooting in the SSP (Stock Service Pistol) class, and I'm shooting a literally stock M&P Pro with just some Warren Tactical Sights and some grip tape on it and that's it.

No trigger job, nothing special, just as it comes out of the box? Completely stock.

Why did you choose the M&P 9mm? The 9mm Pro just feels better. It's more balanced. I had a 9mm Standard, a 4", before but the 5" just gives me better balance, better recovery on target, and the gun just seems to track and shoot better in my experience.

What do you think of the match so far? It's a good match you know. It's my first and only IDPA match of the year, so it's trigger time for me to get ready for nationals next year. They always do a great job here. These guys, they know how to run a club and the stages are great.

They're doing a good job, and this gets me some time behind the gun because I just got this gun two weeks ago. I'm trying to get some trigger work on it because my old gun had a trigger job on it, but this one doesn't and I'm trying to get used to that.

What other matches are you shooting this year? I just shot the 3-gun Nationals, I shot the Steel Challenge, the Steel Nationals, Bianchi Cup, I'm going to the USPSA back to back Nationals next week, I do some 3-gunning here and there, I'm going to the Fort Benning 3-gun match this year, the IPSC Nationals in South Carolina, so I'm very involved with USPSA and IPSC. I'm getting ready for Greece next year and the World Shoot.

How have you done so far this year? It's a learning curve, I've had to change equipment, but I think I'm going to do fine. I was an STI shooter before, and the M&P is a much different kind of gun. It's definitely tough getting used to, but I think by Nationals I'll be tuned in and ready to go.

Are you training any differently for IDPA than you do for a Steel Challenge? Well, first to say I train for IDPA would be quite a step in the wrong direction. I think I mentally prepare for IDPA differently because it's more about everything else and the shooting is just kinda incidental. The targets are close, it's pretty easy, but you've got to be mentally prepared to deal with all the different idiosyncrasies with the rules and that sort of thing.

My preparation for something like Steel Challenge is all repetitive. Shooting, shooting, shooting, and here it's more mental.

How many rounds do you usually shoot a month? Typically, what is this, September? This month, sadly I have shot about 700 rounds. I don't shoot a lot, I'm a dry fire guy.

I average 500-1000 rounds per month, depending on what match is coming up. My budget and my family life just doesn't allow me to shoot as much as I would like to. It's nice to be close to a range like this, but I do a lot of mental visualization, I do a lot of gun manipulation, stuff I can do at home like dry fire. It's just always seemed to work for me. I just kinda know what the gun looks like when it's going off and I don't have to shoot a lot of rounds to confirm it, although I'd like to. It just doesn't work out usually. Family stuff comes first and shooting second.

When you're not on the professional shooting circuit, what else are you doing? I'm actually self employed, I own Straighter Solutions. It's basically a training company. I travel all over the country and teach people to shoot, either competitively or LE/Military Tactical, 3-gun, rifle, whatever. If a bullet comes out of it I teach it. I'm just doing a lot of instruction there, I've got three classes scheduled in the next month and a half, so it's going pretty well.

What got you started in shooting? I was a police officer in Southern Virginia, and I was an OK shooter. I was a cop, I thought I was the best shooter. I was the best shooter in my class which means I was the best shooter in the world, right? Then somebody showed me a video of Jerry Barnhart shooting a stage and it was just unbelievable to me to see how fast he could shoot.

Instantly, I asked the guy showing me the video "What police department does he work for?" because I automatically assumed that all good shooters were cops. That's just the way it is, right? Turns out he was an electrician, and that got me a little concerned that an electrician could shoot that good and I'm suppposed to be a cop protecting the public and I shoot so much worse. I decided to start shooting competitively for training purposes. I just kinda got good at it and over the course of a month or two as I got pretty good I decided to do it competitively.

Are there any other sponsors or anyone else you want to mention? Well, I've got a lot of great sponsors, but Smith & Wesson, they take care of me. Accurate Iron is my gunsmith, luckily he doesn't have to do a whole lot because I only shoot stock guns, but he does all of my 1911 work. Warren sights obviously, they're all I use on all my guns if it's iron sights. Schuemann barrels, and... [glances at shirt] Who else do I got on there? Oh yeah, Speed Shooter Specialties. They deal with all the Smith & Wesson aftermarket stuff. And Straighter Solutions, obviously I'm self-sponsored because it's my business.

Everyone is really good, but these are the guys who have been with me since the beginning and I stay loyal to those guys. They're very supportive.

Phil Strader makes his home in the Tulsa suburb of Owasso Oklahoma with his wife and children.

Cheaper Than Dirt! Interviews Sarah Irish

I was talking with Julie Golob a couple of weeks ago and we were discussing the Women of USPSA and some of the up and coming Junior Shooters when Julie mentioned that I should talk to Sarah Irish and possibly interview her and post her profile here on the Shooter's Log. Quite honestly, I didn't know much about Sarah except for hearing of her performance at the ICORE match last year, but a quick search turned up Sarah's website and some videos that truly blew me away. I could see why Julie wanted me to talk with Sarah: she just turned 18 years old, but already she's one of the fastest shooters in USPSA!

Julie put us in touch, and I got the chance to give Sarah a call and talk to her a bit about how she got started shooting and her future in the USPSA and shooting sports in general.

Hi Sarah, thanks for talking with us today. First of all, congratulations on your recent High Lady win in the Open Division at Area 5. Thanks! I was really surprised that I placed high in that match. I'd just graduated high school the weekend before, so I didn't have time to really prepare myself. I spent two weeks before the match writing my graduation speech, and generally getting ready for graduation. Going into it, I didn't expect much in the way of my performance at Area 5.

Did you grow up shooting with your family? Not really. I went out with my dad to shoot at my grandpa's property when I was at least 3. After that I didn't shoot again until I was probably 12. I took a Hunter's Safety Course. After that I went to the range with my dad, trying to get some practice and we saw that they were doing a bowling pin shoot, so I started doing that.

You just came across the bowling pin shoot at the range and thought it looked like fun? Yeah, I thought it looked like fun so I tried that for a while.

It looks like you got pretty good at the bowling pin shoots, you set a number of record times clearing the table. Yes, I set the fastest time at the range. The time was a 1.98 second run, and then more recently I shot a 1.18.

That's incredibly fast. Tell us a little bit about how you do it. It took me a while to get there. I never really get a chance to practice much, even now because of school. It kept me really busy so I never got much chance to practice. I really just practiced by shooting other matches.

Does your family participate with you at the matches? My parents actually shoot most matches that I shoot at. Both my mom and dad shoot with me. They help me with the financial side. Now I'm a poor college student going out, so they help me with that part. [Ammunition prices] are brutal. Buying the open guns has a big [financial] impact as well.

How often do you get the chance to go shoot a match or get out to the range? We usually shoot a match every weekend or so.

Do you practice at home at all with dryfire or airsoft? I do have an airsoft setup in the attic. I do that occasionally, but I've been slacking from that. I do do some dryfire occasionally.

Do you have a typical routine or drill you do when you dryfire practice? Not really. Mostly I'll look back on video to see what I messed up on at the last match, what's something I could improve on. I'll do some draws and reloads too.

Do you do any specific training for the different types of matches like Steel Challenge? Not usually. I usually just go out and shoot, which makes me rather atypical compared to your normal shooter.

It sounds a lot like you're just a natural. {nervous laughter} I guess you could put it like that. I will train if I get the chance to, but usually I just have a lot of time constraints.

Did you have any coaches or mentors who helped you as you began to get better and faster? Not really. I did do Kay and Jerry Miculek's Junior Camp twice. That helped me out a lot.

I'm actually at their house right now training. They've really helped me out a lot. I've been practicing down here from the beginning of the month.

You've recently made the move from Junior to Ladies. Do you feel ready to compete against the big names like Kay Miculek and Jessie Abbate? I think I'm ready to go. I've done a lot of matches. I generally just shoot to go out and have a good time. I never really got competitive until now.

Still, you definitely seem to have a competitive spirit. You just graduated Salutatorian of your high school class. Then last year you picked up a revolver for the first time and shot the ICORE match where you managed to place 5th overall and take home a win in the Ladies division. Obviously something has awakened that competitive nature. Yeah, I think part of is that I'm pretty good at adapting to new situations. The revolver match, I'd only shot a revolver three times before that match. I'm just generally pretty good at picking up something new and figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing.

You're heading into college now and I'm wondering where you see yourself heading in the future. Will you stick with Chemical Engineering or do you see yourself becoming a part of a major shooting team? I'd kinda like to do both, if it's possible. Becoming a sponsored shooter, that'd be way more fun than being a chemical engineer. It depends on the financial side as well, whether or not I can support myself in a shooting career. I'm not entirely sure about that, but I'd be open to the opportunity.

Are you planning on continuing to shoot while you're in college? Actually, the college I'm going to has a range 6 miles away. If I get a chance I'll be out there as often as I can.

Is there a pistol team or shooting club at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology where you'll be attending this fall? They have a rifle team with a rifle range on campus. I've thought about participating with the team but I'm not sure yet. I may go to tryouts, depending on when they are. It's just so different from USPSA, I don't know if that will throw me off. They do like 60 shots over the course of two hours.

It would be a different experience. I might do it just for the experience, but I haven't decided so far.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and I know we all look forward to seeing your future performances in USPSA. Thank you too.

After this interview Sarah placed 3rd in her division at the USPSA World Championship Steel Challenge. She's currently attending Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology where she's pursuing a degree in Chemical Engineering. You can learn more about Sarah at her website SarahIrish.com

Brad Engmann: USPSA Grand Master and Top Shot Competitor

Following up on our interview with Kelly Bachand, we tracked down Brad Engmann and asked him if he could sit down and talk with us about his background in the shooting sports as well as his elimination this week from the History Channel's reality TV show "Top Shot".

Living in San Francisco, there aren't many gun ranges or shooting clubs to be a part of, but Brad showed an interest in shooting from an early age. It wasn't until years later that he discovered USPSA and action shooting, and this late discovery led him to wonder why it doesn't have more exposure in the Bay Area. His drive to help move the shooting sports into the mainstream of society is part of what motivated him to apply to be on Top Shot.

Here's what he had to say about his early years shooting and his experience on the show.

Cheaper Than Dirt: How long have you been shooting and how did you get started shooting? I know being in San Francisco you probably didn't grow up around firearms. Brad: What ended up happening was that I convinced my dad to take me to the range when I was 13. There is obviously not a very big firearms base out here in San Francisco, but just thought that it'd be cool to go and he took me. That was nice of him. We actually ended up making it kind of our weekend thing, so we'd always go to the range. It was just a static range, there was nothing particularly special about it.

What I ended up doing was that I was into car racing for a while and I'd take my car up to the track and I'd end up working on cars and building them and all that type of stuff. One thing that I kind of liked about shooting was that when cars got really expensive there was the same racing appeal where you could just go out and try to go as fast as possible. It kind of played on my previous experience at the range for a while. I picked up USPSA about three years ago I would say.

Cheaper Than Dirt: It's funny that you should mention car racing, I know that John Bagakis had a background racing cars before he got started in the shooting sports. Myself and a number of us working at Cheaper Than Dirt! who participate in the shooting sports like IDPA and IPSC also raced cars until we discovered that bullets were less expensive than tires. Brad: Yeah, and if your gun blows up you're out only $900 to replace the whole thing, versus taking out your car in a wall.

It's interesting to see how many competitive shooters have made the transition from racing to shooting. Tell me, did your family own a firearm before your dad took you out to the range that first time? We actually rented one for many many years. We didn't own one. I would shoot, ironically a Beretta 92F.

Similar to the one you complained so much about on Top Shot- Well, there's a little more to the story than that-

OK, we'll get into that in a little bit- But yeah, there was that and then I ended up buying a 96 in .40 S&W, it was the Brigadier version with the heavier slide and I kinda scrapped that in favor of a Sig P226 later on. That's what I shot my first USPSA year with was the 226.

How old were you when you got your first pistol? My dad bought it when I was I guess 16 or 17, because I said "What's the point of us renting the thing..." It wasn't really necessary for us to have a gun, but it was more of a cost issue. I liked to go shooting and it was just practical to just have our own firearm.

It's always been a sport thing for me. I was never really particularly concerned [about self defense]. Obviously the arguments are sensible and everything else, but my main concern was the sporting aspect. It wasn't the defense issue.

So, you're racing cars. You're going to the range and shooting on the weekends. At what point did you decide to take up shooting as a competitive sport? I actually quit shooting altogether for about 4 years or so. The reason was because I really wasn't aware of USPSA. this is something I think is an issue with the shooting sports in general. There's not a lot of information that's propagated throughout just the mainstream shooting community as far as what's available in terms of sports.

I'll talk to people about USPSA and they're amazed that this thing even exists, that they let us go running around with guns and shoot stuff. They've never even fathomed that there would be something out there like that. So I just wasn't aware, and I got bored just shooting at paper at a static range. Racing was more fun, and of course you pick up more girls with cars than you can with handguns. I just kinda stopped shooting for a while, but once the racing element got really expensive I got really frustrated with it.

I started looking into more sports and actually, I saw something on the History Channel in a Mail Call episode where this guy was shooting a plate rack, and he said "I'm from USPSA," and I thought "What's that?" and I looked them up.

You can blame the Gunny then for getting you started in USPSA. I can blame him, that's exactly right.

As you got into USPSA, I'm sure you had to have picked up a mentor or a coach, or even just someone you looked up to within the sport. Who is someone who you look up to, who you try to model yourself and your shooting style after? And who are your mentors? Actually, the interesting thing about that is that while there were people who I met at the club who were helpful and would give me pointers, I never really had a coach. What happened was is that I didn't really know anybody at the club. I just thought it would be fun and I just drove out there by myself and took the class.

I shot the first match by myself. Actually the first stage that I ever shot I was so nervous that I forgot to put in my earplugs. It was an IDPA match fortunately and it was only 16 rounds [on that stage]. I was so focused on hitting the targets, and at the end of the stage I unloaded and showed clear and I remember wondering "What the hell was that ringing sound?" I thought something was wrong with my hearing protection until I realized "Oh! It's not there!"

But I never had a mentor per se. Pretty much what it's been, is that I discovered it was fun, and I discovered it was something I want to be good at. I worked as a range officer at my local club so that I could go out and practice whenever I wanted, but it's just been essentially me figuring it out.

It's kind of difficult to figure out exactly if you're doing everything right. As far as the top guys, I just knew that I wasn't shooting as fast as some of these guys could, especially Vogel and Sevigny. They're both in production, they're both shooting the same gun that I was at that point. I would just constantly watch videos of them and try to discern what techniques they were using. I remember there's a video on the GSSF Foundation where Sevigny is aiming a Glock at the camera and I would freeze frame that and then look in the mirror to see if my grip angle was correct on my left hand. It was just a lot of careful scrutiny trying to figure out what the right thing to do was.

It's a lot like golf. There are a lot of small adjustments that can be made within the hand and hand position, the grip strength and everything else, that will have a dramatic effect on your shooting. With the absence of a coach and even with the difficulty of trying to analyze it on video, those little adjustments are very important to make. So I had to look to a lot of the top guys to see what they were doing so I could just try to, for now, emulate it.

Let’s talk about training. Do you still train regularly? I do. One of the guys in my club is a really top level shooter, his name's Keith Garcia. He shoots 3-gun a lot but he's a Grand Master in Limited and just became a Grand Master in Production. He's a really really excellent shooter and he's been helpful to me in the past. He's pointed out some things that have kinda been wrong that I've had to work with.

As far as training is concerned, one of the things he turned me on to is airsoft training and shooting every day. Which, even if I'm not shooting live fire I'll try to get the airsoft gun out and shoot some steel targets in my garage. I've got a full setup in there, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend.

Some people are content shooting for fun, they're hobbyists and they're going to do what they want to do. But some people who are really driven, who really want to be at the top of this game, are going to have to carefully analyze every iota of it because if you lose by a second in this game you're going to lose by a lot. Everything has to be tuned to such perfection. At the higher levels you're really trying to squeeze every bit of performance out that you possibly can.

For new shooters, I think that people are sometimes afraid to try new things, because what you see in a performance curve you see a dip in performance, even if it's something that's worthwhile to try out. You're obviously going to screw up for a while when you're trying to adapt. Vogel has a good quote in his video which is "You'll try something in practice again and again until finally you'll be in the middle of a match and you'll just realize that you've been doing it and that it's finally sunk in to your subconscious." That's when you know that you're going to be able to adopt it well. But what a lot of people do is they will fall into a comfort zone and they'll refuse to either listen to advice or try new things because they don't want to have that dip in performance and fail for a brief period of time and experiment. I think that's a very essential component.

You mentioned airsoft. We've spoken to Dave Sevigny and Caleb Giddings who both promote dry fire. How comparable do you find airsoft to be to dry fire practice? I think there's two elements to that. The first of which is that airsoft is just more fun. My buddy who's an SF Sheriff produces a bunch of targets called Bam Airsoft. They have Texas Stars, they have plate racks, they have timers, they have a full steel challenge course that you can set up. You get the reciprocating action of the gun, and it's fun to watch the targets fall down. The problem with dry fire for me is that you have to rack the gun for each trigger pull. Unless you want to move around the house practicing your footwork and not pulling the trigger, I don't think it's mentally engaging. You don't know what limits to push.

In the absence of anything else, it's a good thing to try.

Do you find the simulated recoil of the airsoft to pretty closely replicate live fire? You can't really practice recoil that well. It's the equivalent of somebody going out there with a .22 LR. Because there's no recoil on the gun you should be able to shoot that much faster. You can focus on your transitions and you can focus on your splits and pulling the trigger as fast as you possibly can. When you go out to the real range, make sure that you have the grip strength and that you get your timing down. There are certain things that you can practice really well with airsoft that are superior to dry fire in a lot of ways.

What type of training do you do? What’s an average week of training look like for you? It's a lot. Some times I burn out a little bit. I was shooting live fire about 3 times a week or so, and I would drop about 1,000 rounds a week. Then I would shoot a few hundred BBs every night when I wasn't on the range. If I didn't go to the range I would come home and I would, even if I didn't want to and I was tired and had to get up for work, I would still go out to the garage and shoot a few hundred BBs in about 15-20 minutes. That really helps.

There are these elite guys in shooting like Vogle, Leatham, Sevigny, even Blake Miguez and J.J., those guys are the elite of shooting and I'm not there. I realize that. So, the way I practice is I'm trying to- you know Sevigny, who you inteviewed, said he only practices sometimes once a week, and I can understand why because he already has the skill. He's doing a lot of maintenance. Obviously he's trying to figure some speed elements out, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get up there. That's why I practice so often.

Let’s move on and talk about Top Shot for a bit. What prompted you to apply to be a Top Shot contestant? You get to be on TV dude! {laughs} But, ah... shooting needs a big mainstream appeal. Getting back to what I mentioned earlier, a lot of people aren't aware of my sport. I think shooting in some places, in particular out here [in San Francisco and California in general], kinda gets a bad rap. People I think will dismiss it outright in some areas, either the defensive elements or the sportsman elements, or generally they'll just look at you [strangely]. When I explain to some people what I do, like say when I just get back from practice and I'm meeting my girlfriend's friends or my coworkers and they ask "Oh, what are you practicing?" expecting me to say "Softball" or "Bowling" and when I say "Oh, I'm a competitive pistol shooter," they go "Really?!"

Invariably I can get them interested once I kind of explain it, but there's not a lot of mainstream exposure. One of my side elements, aside from becoming rich and famous, was to hopefully promote the sport a little bit and to get people more aware that shooting competitively is a sport. It's something that a lot of people, families, and whoever else can enjoy. It's not like we're training for the apocalypse out here. We're shooting targets and we're doing so in a very athletic way.

Did you do any particular training or preparation prior to your appearance? Well, the funny thing was when I was in between racing and shooting my hobby was a lot of weight lifting. I mean a lot. I blew out my left knee playing football and what I ended up doing was when I was rehabbing it was that I got really heavy into weights. I got up to dead lifting 425, squatting a ton of weight, bench pressing a lot, but the problem was that wasn't really doing it for me. It was kinda like shooting at a static range. I didn't know what I was training for.

So, I took all the time I was putting into weight lifting, which was 4-5 days a week, and put all of that into shooting. Which was why I went from barely making B-Class in 2008 to becoming a Grand Master a year and a half later. It was just all the time. What I ended up doing was neglecting my physical shape. I ended up putting on a big paunch because I wasn't lifting weights. Pulling a trigger doesn't really burn too many calories. So yeah, I had to hit up the gym, but J.J. still made us look like a bunch of sissies, walking around there like freakin' Superman all day.

You didn't do any extra pistol work or pick up a rifle or a bow and arrow in preparation for the show? The thing was we didn't have any idea what the show was going to be like, we just knew it was a competition show and that the History Channel was doing it, and that there might be some mystery projectile weapons.

A buddy of mine shoots SASS (that's Single Action Shooting Society or Cowboy Shooting), so I went and borrowed his Peacemaker, his single shot shotgun, I borrowed his double barrel shotgun, I borrowed a Winchester 73, and then I took out my own AR (which I don't shoot too much) and was drilling targets there. It turned out, after having been on the show, that a lot of the challenges were accuracy based and didn't require movement, at least when I was there.

My training was organized a little bit more around speed shooting I think, but I just wanted to get familiar with all of the types of guns. I think I got the reload down for the single action pretty good, but it's difficult to train when you don't know what the contest is so I just tried to get as familiar as possible.

Obviously those who might be applying for Season 2 are going to have a distinct advantage. Oh yeah, because they know exactly what it is they're getting into. We didn't. We didn't know there were going to be teams until we were on the day we went up to the mansion and I started noticing the sound people had carts and one of them said "Red" and the other said "Blue" and I'm thinking "What the hell is going on here?" Then they walked us up and of course Colby came in and said "You guys are on a Red and a Blue Team."

I had no idea. I kinda assumed it was going to be the kind of show where you would have a given weapon for that week and then the people who performed the worst would be eliminated. I didn't know there was going to be much of anything, but the same producer who did Survivor also did Top Shot, so maybe it should have been more in the back of my mind.

Did you go into the show with any particular strategy in mind? I refuse to vote for anybody based on politics, I just did not want to. I voted exclusively based on performance. Much like what Caleb did, even though percentage wise Blake and J.J. are better shooters, if you were to take just a random shooting competition they would end up beating me. I still wouldn't want to vote them out, I would want to shoot against them even if there was the hundred grand at stake.

I made a point of trying not to talk trash about my fellow competitors, and not to play politics once I found out there was the team voting. What you saw in Episodes 2 and 3 was I wasn't entirely sure the direction the competition was going in, and then there was just a little bit of frustration there.

Let's get into the first elimination challenge you were involved in with Frank on the MGM Ironman style zipline during episode 2. You had to be pretty happy seeing that challenge, it seemed to play right into your strong suit. Yeah, I was happy about seeing that. Either way, even if I lost, I thought it was going to be awesome that I had to go down a zip line on national TV. That's not something that you can say that you did every day.

I knew that it played to my strengths in transitions, and then there were a couple of strategy elements going in there on how to shoot the course. I thought that I pretty much had it in the bag when I was introduced to the challenge.

Stop for a second and tell me a bit about your strategy going into the challenge. Did you have any idea where the targets were before you got on there? We had no idea where the targets were, but I kinda anticipated it was going to be a left to right. I could see a bunch down at the bottom of the hill, but the first ones that popped up were a surprise.

What the legal team told me was that if you hit the target, it's going to shatter, and that's going to count as a hit. They said they were made out of glass. So I come down the zip line and I shoot the first target on the right and it has just a center bullet hole, and I'm wondering "Is this supposed to shatter?" so I shot it twice and I missed the one on the left because I was too busy shooting the first one twice. Afterwards what I did was I shot a bunch of rounds at each one of the targets because I wanted to make sure that I claimed the hits because they couldn't really see them. I wasn't sure entirely with the gun.

If it was completely dialed in, like in USPSA, you call your hits. You shoot the target once, you know what your sights looked like, and you move on. But there, I wasn't entirely sure of point of aim so I made sure to throw three rounds at each one. I took a conservative run on the first one. I went to slide lock too.

I got a few edges which weren't called as hits, so they were close, but they have the arbitration team and everything else. What ended up happening in the second run once there was a tie was I knew that I could do a single shot with each one. They took out the first two targets and we went down and there were eight targets and two bonus targets. I came out of the gate and just go one for one in each of the three, and this is like a 40 yard shot or so. I just went 1, 2, 3, on the first three targets, shooting just over my feet.

Then I was kinda stupid, and you can see this in elimination interview. I thought I had plenty of time I can hit all of these, so I threw two rounds at the bonus target on the left. The problem that I had was that the zip line picked up in speed. I was so focused on hitting the bonus target that I then had to swing back and I had shoot two more targets on the right. At that point, because Frank had done pretty well on the first challenge, he's a good shooter. I know people have been questioning his Weaver stance, but you're strapped into a chair so you can't move your shoulders at all. You couldn't pivot your body. You can only move your hands, so the Weaver stance doesn't matter. It's only whether or not you can deliver a single shot on a target accurately. That's certainly something Frank could do, he's a very good natural shooter.

I thought I'd lost at that point because we both hit five targets on our first run, and I had an opportunity to clean all of them and I got stupid and chased the bonus one, so I thought Frank was just going to go down there and run me. I really did. That was a very bad feeling when I had to wait for 45 minutes to an hour for them to reset everything so Frank could shoot. When I heard him fire about 8 or 9 shots, I thought "I'm toast..." but he didn't get it. I just think he had a bad run, he had a good chance of winning that time.

One thing that people don't realize is, they're so used to the 4th wall on television, that when they watch things they assume that the participants are unaware of what's happening and how they're going to be perceived. I knew that if I lost that challenge, the pistol challenge, that as a USPSA guy I was going to get lit up. Absolutely lit up. Furthermore, I was eliminating Frank who I'd met in casting, and we'd hung out a lot. I knew him pretty well and he's a really good guy. I really thought I was going to go home and I eventually won on a wing and a prayer. I had to eliminate a good guy that everybody liked, so there was a lot going on and I just went back and kinda crashed out.

Moving on to the bow and arrow challenge, that seemed like a pretty frustrating challenge for everyone involved and the red team ended up losing. What went into the process that resulted in you being chosen on the nomination range and sent to the next elimination challenge? That I wasn't too sure about. I know there were some personality issues. The thing is that the conflicts are going to be enhanced on television. You have to figure that you're living with somebody for a while, and even if there's a little bit of a disagreement going on that might motivate the voting, you're still living with them. You're still eating with them, you're still hanging out with them, you're sitting in the van for 2 hours waiting to be on set with them.

There wasn't a huge amount of tension or animosity there, and for me I didn't mind. The bow and arrow challenge I thought was more of a crap shoot because nobody really had any advantage there. If you could deliver arrows accurately on target you were in good shape. The difference between Kelly and J.J.'s shot was determined by a myriad of factors. Skill is one of them, but there were a number of others that went into them making that shot. As I said, I didn't really care if they were going to vote for me. That didn't matter to me.

As I said I'm not going to play politics. If you're going to vote for me, whatever. I'm here because I want to shoot, I'm not here to sit out and not be there in the challenge. I'm not going to try to shy away from a challenge. This is what I do. This is why I'm on the show.

Still, it seemed like your tone changed once you realized that you might be eliminated after the bow and arrow challenge, with your now infamous quote being repeated across the internet. You know, that quote was made into a T-shirt by James Ong who's a grand Master Open Class shooter. So, at the California Golden Bullet this year, everybody showed up with a shirt [with the quote], and under there was a picture of a bow and arrow shooter with a circle and a line through it. I'm actually wearing the shirt right now.

If I knew it would have been cross bows, I would have been happy, but I thought there was just going to be another bow and arrow thing. To me it just seemed entirely a luck issue. I mean, if you're shooting at a target 30 yards away that's one thing, but we were shooting with this long bow at 100 yards with literally about 15 arrows practice. At that point I'm saying I'm happy to shoot against whoever. That's why I'm here, but to put me up against somebody in a bow and arrow challenge, it's like "What's the point?" I mean, if I got eliminated there then I would have been like "Well, why even bother?" Anybody could get eliminated at this thing. You're taking skill out of the equation if it was bows and arrows at that point.

That's something Caleb touched on in one of our interviews. It was a marksman challenge designed to have competitors be able to pick up virtually any projectile weapon and be proficient with it. As I said, I thought it was going to be, when I first went on the show, an event where it was going to be multiple weapons with the worst performer in each particular genre, or in that particular episode, would be going home. That's how I thought they were going to eliminate everybody.

I knew I was going to be shooting a bow and arrows, don't get me wrong. I read the description of the show. The thing was I thought that the bow and arrows were going to be one of many factors in determining somebody's overall performance and whether or not they're out of there. Which is fair. For me to go on the show and represent shooting and have a lot of background in practicing shooting and then to not just compete in this thing, but have the chance to be eliminated and leave the show and go home on something, it seemed to me that was like rolling dice or something.

Fortunately it was crossbows. Those crossbows were bad ass. They were dialed. They had cool triggers. It was an interesting thing to shoot, and it was based on a skill set that I think both of us had.

On to the challenge. It looked like it was windy that day. How did that affect your performance? There were a couple of funny things about that challenge. The first of which was that we didn't shoot at 10 yards. I talked to Bill Trowbridge who was the expert. Just before we went to shoot at 10 yards he said "You might want to use the top of the triangle on the reticle." I convinced them to let us look through a scope to figure out what the hell he was talking about.

My first shot I used exactly what he said but I didn't hit the target. It went over it, so I had to aim at the bottom of the apple to hit it at 10 yards. The second part was about the wind. At 40 yards it was less predictable because the wind was swirling a little bit. What actually happened was I got on that 40 yard target very fast, and I dropped a couple of arrows at it and I finally hit the target. You can see the apple spinning on the show. What happened was, there are people who are supposed to call out the hits. They didn't call it as a hit. Bill was saying "I think that's a hit," and then I say "I think that's a hit," and then Bill Carns is still reloading to shoot again so I'm like "Is that a hit? Is that a hit?" Meanwhile I'm reloading the crossbow, thinking how hilarious would that be to spin the thing and then hit the next target. What I actually had to do was I picked the same point of aim, which was about the left edge of that circle and I drilled it right through.

After that show, the Red team had a pretty good run and won some team events. Still, the team was pretty small at this point, it was just you, Kelly, Peter, and Denny. Going into the single action shooting challenge ya'll had a small team and suffered another loss. It looked like Denny had put in a pretty poor performance but still didn't get nominated for an elimination challenge. We've heard from Denny and Kelly to get their point of view, but what did you see? Why Kelly and Andre instead of Denny and one of those two? Well the thing was at that point, Kelly and Andre looked the worst in the challenge. The thing for Denny was that he had a few bad habits he developed from doing his cowboy mounted shooting.

The difference that appeared to me in my mind, and this is something that you can't pick up on television, Kelly and Andre seemed very uncomfortable with the Peacemaker. When you watch them shoot it, Andre had two ADs. He had two of them in a row. Kelly was missing, he missed some of the biggest targets, 8 or 9 shots I thought. It wasn't just having a bad day, because everybody can have a bad day. I don't think people should be judged on their shooting performance just for having one bad day.

The reason Andre accidentally discharged was because his finger was in the trigger guard when he pulled back the hammer and he let the hammer fall onto the chamber. The reason J.J. accidentally discharged is because we were told we could only load the gun with 5 rounds instead of 6. What happened to him was that in practice they were doing it a different way, whereas in the challenge he loaded in the 5, except instead of skipping a chamber and loading them all in, he loaded them all in and then skipped a chamber. Or maybe it was the other way around. The point is, he had to cock the hammer and then rotate the cylinder over, when he actually didn't have to. He ended up dropping the hammer onto a loaded chamber, it was just a reloading thing because he lacked the familiarity. Not his fault at all. That could happen to anybody.

Andre accidentally discharged twice, and I could see just watching him that he looked like he was in Never-Never Land out there. The same thing goes for Kelly, he looked a bit like an inexperienced shooter at that point with the pistol. That kinda stuck out in my mind a little bit when I said, "Well, this is a challenge that requires multiple shot engagements. It's a handgun, and it requires some speed." Just watching them I thought "This is why the two of them should go," because Denny, it just seemed like he had his act together but he just had a bad run. He looked comfortable behind the gun, whereas Kelly and Andre did not.

In this most recent episode, it came down to yourself and Kelly shooting shotguns, and of course you got sent home after that one. Tell me a bit about the team performance leading up to the elimination range. I had a great practice session. I shot really well on the double action, I think it was the Smith & Wesson. It had like a 9 pound trigger. It was probably the worst trigger you could ever feel for a revolver you had to shoot accurately with one hand. A lot of us did pretty well with that. The next one was the mirror shooting, which I did not do incredibly well with. Kelly, Denny, and Pete all did well, they all drilled exactly what they were looking for.

Then it came to be the cabbage challenge. I read your interview with Kelly, I actually was the first person to hit. I got two hits on the cabbage. The first one was a graze, the second one I drilled. Pete was terrible on it, Kelly hit one, and Denny didn't hit any. When we got back there was the Bocce ball thing, I actually was out there practicing for a little while. They had this picture frame that you stack on a desk and it holds the picture flat.

I'm not sure if [Kelly] was out there at the same time, but it's that type of thing where they'll have the camera on there and somebody will be out there for a limited period of time. We were out there a bunch. I didn't practice nearly as much as Pete and Kelly did. That's certainly true, but when it came time for the team challenge the reason I went for the "Play It Safe" strategy is because I didn't think Chris was going to hit two out of three for the nails.

But one thing I must say is that there's been a lot of single shot stuff and there's been a lot of memory stuff that didn't involve very difficult shots. The Peacemaker challenge where Chris performed he hit 12 for 12 out of that, and he also was able to hit 2 out of 3 nails. I think that it's, surprisingly to me, the least talked about performance out of everybody on the show. Chris impressed me a lot with how he was able to deliver on those two challenges. Nobody expected him to go 2 for 3, we thought maybe he'd get lucky and get 1.

Things obviously didn't work out quite the way you had planned on that challenge, the Red team lost, and you and Kelly were sent to the elimination challenge. Going into that elimination, when you saw you were going to be shooting shotguns, what was your reaction? Have you ever fired shotguns at clay pigeons before? I've done a little bit. I've shot skeet maybe three times in my life. Once I learned the technique of it, just putting the little bead on the target, I got pretty good at it. The only other time I've shot skeet was hanging out with Blake Miguez in Louisiana with Pete down there a couple of weeks ago, and we were out in the pouring rain and Blake brings out these humongous boxes of skeet and shotgun shells. I actually tried the trick again, but I actually discovered there was a different way of doing it which actually worked out a little bit better, but I'd never really thrown a skeet before.

But I was confident going into the challenge. In the practice itself when Scott was throwing for me, in one instance I went 5 for 5 on his throws, and I could hit 4 pretty much every time out of the 5 that he threw up. My throws were good too. The caveat was when I got out there and attempted to make the throws. Scott emphasized throwing them up very very high and using your legs a lot. What I would do was get into a crouch like I was doing a lunge, and I'd just whip them up into the air. The problem was when I had the shotgun on my left hip it ended up causing me to short stroke the throw. What you'll see there is the skeet don't go very high at all, and they go all over the place because of the short stroke.

What I discovered when I watched some videos of Tom Knapp, is that it's actually a lot easier to hold the shotgun without it touching your body just with your left hand. Then hold the skeet so that instead of holding them with your thumb on the top and your fingers on the bottom and then trying to twist, instead you rotate them around so that they sit lengthwise in your hand and just keep your left thumb on the edge and just roll them off of your fingers. Then without using your legs a whole lot you just come up and shoot them.

I think that Scott had us going over a more advanced technique which probably works really well for exhibition, but I think that as a novice it was more difficult for me to pick that up while shooting the shotgun. We weren't able to practice throwing while holding the shotgun in practice either.

During the challenge itself, Kelly was the first to have a miss when he only claimed 1 bird out of 2. At that point, did you think you had a pretty good chance of winning? Yeah, I thought I had it in the bag. He went up and he threw one and I thought "OK, I got this. I'm just going to go up and claim my lead and keep moving." But when you look at that throw, if you watch I threw the first one and it hovered at the horizon and I drilled that, but the second one went like 30 feet into the air above it, so I had to track this thing and it's falling at like 30 miles per hour. I had to shoot it right in the middle of a fall. I'm thinking that I can hit these, but if I have another throw like that, I'm in trouble.

I threw three and only hit one and I was kinda pissed off because the three went pretty much about as far spread out as you could possibly get. So I hit the first one on the left and then swung around and the second one was already dropping below the horizon. So, we were pretty much split at that point. When it came to 4, I remember this like it's burned into my mind, Kelly threw up an absolutely perfect group of 4, and I just remember standing there, I was surprised he didn't hit all 4. At that point I already knew that I had lost it because when I came up to 5 I was already debating about throwing the skeet a different way. It was going that badly for me. I just took in a breath and looked out at the mountains and I threw up my 5, determined to shoot them as fast as possible. I shot all 5 shots, but I only hit 2 targets since I was chasing the third below the horizon again.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough and you ended up eliminated by just one clay. What was it like to be on the set, in the heat of competition, at one moment, and then almost quite literlly on a plane heading home then next? It was very surreal to me. It's not like there's a cool down time, there's no readjustment period. You're living in fantasy Hollywood-land for a while, you can't talk to people when you want to, you can't go online, you can't do this, you can't do that, and then all of the sudden I'm sitting in the middle of LAX having my first beer in three and a half weeks. I'm just thinking, "I was just on a reality TV show just 2 hours ago, and here I am on my iPhone having my beer. I'm suddenly back in civilization.

I was looking forward to getting back and seeing my girlfriend, and then kinda getting back into the world. Believe you me, I went out and threw up some skeet on the range the next day and tried to do the "Mental Sanity Test." I still couldn't throw them very well. The only time I could throw them well was when I shot with Blake and he had me try his technique.

What did you learn, what did you take away from the Top Shot experience? I'll put it this way: There is a lot of pressure involved when shooting on television. There is a lot of pressure. There have been a couple of things that I learned. Immediately after the show, one thing that I realized is that you have to calm down and shoot your game.

People saw a lot of me on the show, and it looked like I was getting mad at equipment issues or whatever else. Really how I am is I'm very hard on myself. If I go out there and mess up a stage, if it costs me the match, I kinda go on tilt. I stop caring about the match and get pissed off. People on my squad would notice a complete 180 switch. I would be jovial and happy when I was hanging out with people and cracking jokes or whatever, but after I threw a couple of mikes [misses] for about 45 minutes I'm not somebody you want to talk to. I wouldn't be very friendly.

Just thinking about that, and thinking about it in context with the show, reading the comments and seeing myself on television, one thing I said in a post in the forums is that people are going to remember your character a lot more than they're going to remember your shooting performance. What I was too concerned with during the show is that I knew what people were going to think. I knew people were going to think as a result of that rifle challenge in episode 1, I knew what people were going to think as a result of the Beretta, but the funny thing was what I really got hammered on was my personality. Obviously it was a caricature that I didn't think was entirely fair, but I was getting hammered for my worst elements. I wasn't getting hammered for my shooting performance. People started criticizing my shooting performance because they didn't like me as a person on the show.

What occurred to me is that I need to tone it down and stop being so intense on the range. It's the same drive that's driven me to become good at my sport that also can sometimes cause me to go on tilt and get irritable and start not being the best teammate somebody could have. Nobody wants to hang around a guy who's pissed off. I need to relax and enjoy it more. Calm down and enjoy the shooting more. That's part of the competitive mindset that guys like Enos will talk about in his book.

It sounds like quite the life changing experience then. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your background and your experience on Top Shot It's been a pleasure. Hope to see you on the range some day.

Brad Engmann is a Project Manager in San Francisco. He's also a USPSA ranked Grand Master in the production class, and he competes regularly at Area level competitions.

Kelly Bachand: Long Range Rifle Shooter and Top Shot

Kelly Bachand is young, still in his early 20s, but he's made quite a name for himself as a long range rifle shooter. He's won numerous national competitions, as well as the World Championship long range rifle match. Lately you might have seen him on the History Channel's new reality TV show "Top Shot".

Kelly is still a college student, and has a busy schedule between competition, classes, and his part time job he uses to pay for his education. Still, he managed to make time for us to sit down with him and talk a bit about his shooting experience as well as give us some insights behind the scenes of Top Shot.

You've been shooting since a very young age. How did you first get involved in the shooting sports? I've been shooting ever since I was about 5 years old. Like many I got a Red Ryder BB gun for my 5th Christmas, but the very next day we had to take it back and return it for one that was a little more accurate.

I guess it's safe to say you didn't put anyone's eye out? I put no one's eyes out. I mean, this was back when we took the BB gun out Christmas day and we were shooting at pop cans and stuff at a local park. Now I'm pretty sure if you brought a BB gun out there someone would call the cops.

So I shot recreationally for many years with my dad, we'd go hunting, target shooting at the range. My grandpa would always give me guns, he gave me a .22 rifle for my 10th birthday and a .22 pistol a couple of years later.

It was in high school that I first started competing. I saw when I was signing up for classes that I could take a class about shooting and that it fulfilled my P.E. requirement. For three years in high school I did Marine Corps JROTC Marksmanship and I did all right. I won some things, lost many things as well and then after graduating from high school there was a couple of months when I didn't shoot at all competitively. I didn't really know that there was more to do after I shot air rifle in high school until a buddy from church invited me to come out and start shooting High Power.

I shot High Power for a year, which is an AR-15 at ranges from 200 - 600 yards and I did well so I was encouraged to start shooting more long range, 600 yards and farther using open sights. Then, in 2006 is when I tried out for the USA Young Eagles Team, which was the under 21 long range rifle team. I ended up making it and I won a couple of things. I believe I was high junior in the Leech Cup and the high junior in a couple of other things. I think I won a 600 yard match where I was the high expert. I'd have to check back to remember what exactly I won that year.

Sounds like a busy year. It seems you've pretty much stuck to rifles in competition. Why did you choose rifles instead of another shooting sport like International Free Pistol, IDPA, or IPSC? It's just kinda the way it happened. I did shoot a little bit of air pistol in high school. We had a couple of months where we set down the air rifles and picked up the air pistols. Kind of like when you do Free Pistol, 10 meters one handed, so I did to that for a little bit. It didn't really grow on me as much as the rifles did, simply because the rifle portion was made easy for me. People were lending me rifles and encouraging me to come out and shoot matches.

As in most shooting sports I was able to get into it and succeed because there were many more experienced shooters with extra equipment lending me their rifles, lending me their spotting scopes so that I could get started.

Now when you got started in Palma you got Mac Tilton to donate a gun for you. Yes, but that didn't happen for a few years. In 2007, 2008, and the first part of 2009 I was actually shooting a Washington State Association rifle. It was a Savage, kind of an older rifle, but that was what I shot in the World Championships in 2007 and that's what I won quite a few things with from 2006-2008.

Then when I turned 21 I was no longer considered a Junior so I was no longer able to borrow that rifle. I wrote a couple of letters and sent them out to people that I thought could possibly sponsor me and Mac responded. That turned out to be a very very good relationship. Just a few months after he built me the rifle I won the Canadian Nationals with it.

Let's talk about training. What type of training do you do? What's an average week of training look like for you? I probably don't train as much as someone like an Olympic shooter might. I typically practice once a week, sometimes twice a week. I have a 600 yard range not too far away and I go there every other week with my team. I shoot somewhere between 40 and 80 shots from prone, the same sort of thing I'll do in competition.

We do things to simulate long range, because the 1,000 yard range is quite a ways away. I have to drive out of state to get to the closest one. We shoot a target at 600 yards that's been scaled down to look like a 1,000 yard target, so it's really a very small target we're shooting. Then, when I'm on my own, I will go out to a 200 yard range and just plink away by myself.

Now, as far as someone without a whole bunch of natural skill becoming competitive? They absolutely can do it with some discipline. Getting instruction is extremely important so they can learn the proper fundamentals. As far as being competitive and winning at a national or international level, I do think there is a little bit of innate skill that's needed.

You've referred to yourself in the past as a prodigy... I haven't referred to myself as that, but I'll accept it if people want to call me that. I am a little more modest than I'm sometimes portrayed on TV. I've kinda grown into being the kind of person who just lets my shooting score speak for itself. But yeah, being as young as I am and being good at a sport that is typically dominated by much more experienced shooters puts me into an area where people are going to call me a prodigy.

Let's talk about those more experienced shooters. Who is someone who you look up to, who you try to model yourself and your shooting style after? And who are your mentors? In the long range game there are a couple of people that are typically dominating. The thing that I look for and the thing that I strive for is to be able to win or lose and still make and keep friends. Some people aren't good at that, and you'll see some really arrogant people out there winning all the time, but no one wants to talk to them. That's not the person I want to be.

I've got a couple of friends, people that I look up to, one of which is Michelle Gallagher. She's won at long range matches all over the country, internationally also. She does it always with a smile on her face. I definitely look up to her as a friend and a competitor, I talk to her all the time. We bounce a lot of good ideas off of each other. Another good friend and competitor is Bryan Litz, and then someone who just shoots like a machine is Tom Whitaker. He's pretty much set and holds all of the records in the Palma shooting world. If you can hope to shoot like anyone, that's the guy you want to hope to shoot like.

What do you see yourself doing in the future? Do you see yourself going out for the Olympic team or anything like that? That's a good question. A lot of people ask me "If you're on the US National Rifle Team, are you going to the Olympics?" Unfortunately, no. There is not an Olympic event for long range rifle shooting. I guess it's just a land issue. Not too many countries can host 1,000 yard shooting because there's so much land required.

But there is .22 Rimfire... There is .22. Now, I could get started in that, I could go that way, but right now as a college student I don't really have the ability to do that. If someone wanted to buy me the equipment, get me started, I'd be all over it. The truth of the story is, in long range shooting there is a tremendous amount of skill needed on the shooter's part just to break good shots. The people who win though, they don't just break good shots, they break a lot of really good shots, and they call the wind better than anyone else.

If I go up to a 50 yard line shooting .22 against somebody, I've just taken away one of my huge advantages: my ability to know what's happening with the wind. Will I do well? I might, I could probably learn it and do pretty well, but right now I'm excelling at doing well in long range shooting because of that added element. For some reason it's something that I pick up intuitively. It's really just a guessing game, reading the wind and deciding what it's worth. If I start shooting in small bore or air rifle, I take away that advantage and then it just becomes an equipment game: who has the best equipment.

Then there's controlling variables. You're there [shooting small bore] as a shooter with all of your equipment, you want everything to be exactly the same. Whereas with long range shooting, I might be shooting in a mud puddle one week and the next week I'm shooting on concrete.

Those are some good points. Let's move on and talk about Top Shot for a bit. What prompted you to apply to be a Top Shot contestant? A local friend that I shoot with in long range matches actually told me "Hey Kelly, I think you'd be great for this. You should audition for the show." We both auditioned for it together, and oddly enough we were both picked for the top 50 selection.

We both went down there and they have whatever hoops they want us to jump through to see if we are qualified, and so they can pick who they want to be on the show. I kinda felt like I had it in the bag. When I went there I saw I was the youngest person, and I was the youngest by a couple of years. I went into an interview and I felt like I just did really well. I came out of the interview with people telling me they really liked me, they liked my attitude, and I had a lot of fun with it. I fully expected to get a call back a couple of weeks later to tell me that I'd be on the show.

And of course you did get that call. Did you do any particular training or preparation prior to your appearance? I didn't do any training in preparation for Top Shot.

Other than your normal training routine? No, I did shoot a little bit with a .22 conversion kit on my 1911. About 50 rounds or so. But, without having an instructor, just going out and shooting by myself isn't much in the way of training.

Still, you did take the time to re-familiarize yourself with handguns. I tried. I tried, now I was quite busy. I'm in electrical engineering at the University of Washington, and I actually had to finish a quarter of three classes at 300 level engineering two weeks early in order to be on the show. I had to take all of my finals early, turn in final projects early, and my professor wasn't very cooperative. He wanted me to just fail all of my classes and retake them. So, I had quite a nightmare just even getting prepared to get on the show.

Once I finally finished everything and got on the plane to go down to LA I just breathed a big sigh of relief. I was just relieved, it was vacation time now.

You went into this just looking at the competition as a vacation? Yeah, when I'm here at home working, going to school, sleeping very very little, it's kind of a grind. I've got a little bit left of engineering school and I'm paying for it with a part time job, so that doesn't really leave a lot of time for sleep. When I found out I'd be in sunny California, no alarm clock to wake up to, be able to eat whatever the heck I want, I was really looking forward to it.

You know, that's one thing that both Caleb and Denny mentioned was the inordinate amount of down time, long stretches where ya'll really weren't doing anything. There was a lot of down time. Which is why you see some of the shenanigans we got ourselves into. All the arguments and bickering, when you have 16 alpha personalities in a house and you don't have music, you don't have TV, stuff's going to happen.

Did you go into the show with any particular strategy in mind? I thought I had a strategy, but as I continue to watch myself on TV I think I'm finding out I really don't have a lot of tact sometimes.

You did seem to have the ability, for better or for worse, to be able to tick off just about anybody on the show. Yeah, I don't know how I did that. I really am quite a nice guy, a lot of fun, but I guess I just had a way of getting under people's skin sometimes.

How much do you think your lack of experience and young age played into people's perceptions of you? I'd say that lack of experience, that's just an excuse. Now my age? Sure, people definitely I'd almost say discriminated against me and singled me out because of my age. But I don't think anyone could cite my experience as a reason to not like me or to single me out and vote for me. While I am young, I've been shooting quite a while and my intellect and natural talent allows me to pick things up maybe a little faster than the average person.

During the first elimination challenge you shot rifles and sent Mike Seeklander home. That was a pretty stunning defeat and seemed to surprise everybody. Do you think that their estimation of you went up after that? I think some people were surprised, but in my opinion I don't see that they have begun to respect me anymore, seeing as how I just got thrown under the bus. Again. In the last two episodes.

That's a good point. You've been on three elimination challenges so far, and it seems that a couple of your teammates may have it out for you. After the third elimination challenge, what's your mindset like? I was a little shocked really. If you look at my face during the show you can see I'm just a very expressive person and I'm going to wear my emotions on my sleeve. You see just me being appalled, being angry, just leaving my team, walking over to be with the blue team, grabbing my Bible, just trying to relax. I was very appalled, I was very bewildered that Denny hadn't stepped up or asked for some votes.

You know, that's surprising, the last two episodes we saw Denny put in what are quite frankly poor performances, really not contributing anything to the team, and yet he's not been sent to a single elimination challenge. Is it just his good looks and affable personality that have kept him safe? You know, I really couldn't tell ya. I voted for him one episode ago, and I think the reason I voted for Brad is that I was looking at Denny and Brad in last night's episode and I remember thinking that both of them hadn't contributed anything to the team. But I saw that Brad had helped us even less. Not only did he miss all of the shots, but he talked us out of taking the aggressive strategy that really could have helped us win.

We really didn't get a good idea of the alternate "aggressive" strategy. Can you fill us in? Sure. The "play it safe strategy" was what you saw. That helped us lose. The aggressive strategy was an attack plan and it would have gone like this: Denny would have shot the Annie Oakley shot. Apparently that's something he does in his exhibition shooting, so it wouldn't have been very difficult for him. Among the exhibition shots that was the easiest. In practice, Brad shot the smallest group with the Smith & Wesson .38. I think he even hit the little dot twice. I hit it once, Denny hit it once, and Peter never hit it.

How big were those dots? In practice, the dots were about quarter sized. I think we shot it from 8 yards. Not that hard to hit for an experienced pistol shooter. I believe the Smith & Wesson had pounds, 8 maybe 10 pounds trigger pull when you pull right through double action like that. One handed, that's a tough feat.

But it's not nearly as hard as shooting the nails. Oh no, no, I mean the targets we practiced with were 2-3 times as large as the nails. So then I would have shot the large cans we had thrown and Peter would have shot the small cans. Now in practice it only showed that Denny nicked a cabbage. I also nicked one in practice, Peter never did and I don't think that Brad did either. But Peter and I did go out and practice with the Boccie balls for hours.

Yes, we saw you with J.J. and Peter practicing outside, and then later Tara, J.J. and Blake inside practicing with the water gun. Yeah, so we all got in a lot of practice but Brad, oddly enough, never came out and practiced with us with the Boccie balls. So, it wouldn't have made sense really to have him shoot on the aerial target when he really only practiced it 5 times. We got I think 5 throws in practice.

So, the attack plan was Denny on the bottle, Brad shooting the nails, me shooting the large hand thrown cans and Peter shooting the smaller ones. Had we done that, who knows what would have happened, but I've got to think that if I had hit one of the small cans I probably could have hit two or three of the big ones. I think if anyone could have hit the small ones, and more than one of them, it would be Peter. He practiced throwing those Boccie balls for hours. I mean, he had that down pat.

During the soda can toss, you whispered "Just like practice" - what was going through your mind as you prepared for the shot? That's just something I do. I like to put myself at ease any time before I take a shot that someone might view as a high pressure shot. If you had tested my blood pressure and heart rate right then and there it would have been low. I was calm, I was cool, I was collected. I was ready to take the shot, and I fully expected myself to hit it. The funny thing is, I said "just like practice" and in practice I only hit one out of five, so it really was just like practice.

The "just like practice" mantra is something I've done for a while. It's something one of my coaches Gary Rasmussen taught us. When he's at nationals he just tells himself "Ahhh... it's just another cool day here on the practice range. Everyone knows, and you do it all the time, you go out to shoot practice and you shoot the best you've ever shot in your life. Then, lo and behold, you go out and you shoot a match and maybe you're just not mentally there and you just goof up. It happens a lot. Everyone has done that.

It does seem like your mental attitude has really helped you through all of the elimination challenges you've been through. Do you think it's just your mental attitude that has allowed you to be so successful? I do have a certain mental ability that I've kind of picked up and practiced and begun to get better at over the last year, year and a half, to kind of shut other things out while I'm actually shooting. I'll be extremely nervous up until the point I'm actually shooting, extremely extremely nervous.

At the Beretta Xtrema challenge I got up to the line, and I'm way outside of my comfort zone holding this Beretta. I've fired it all of about 20 times now, and I got up there, I focused on what I need to do, and I make the shot. It all kind of goes away. What I do is I just repeat a mantra in my head. I just ask myself, "OK, what do I need to do to make this a perfect shot?" Then I tell myself over and over what I need to do. If I'm continually force feeding myself thoughts, good thoughts positive thoughts about what I need to do to make it perfect, I typically make very good shots.

That's some really great advice there for anybody in any of the shooting disciplines. That's right out of Lanny R. Bassham's book "With Winning in Mind". I read that a year and a half ago and it's a great book.

You'd recommend that book to any competitive shooter? Definitely.

Let's talk about the last elimination challenge against Brad. Did you have any shotgun experience prior to that? Well, I used to work at a shotgun range actually. My first real job when I was 15 I worked at a shotgun range. I used to leave my shotgun there and then go shoot some on lunch breaks. Now, I didn't ever compete or anything-

Still, one could argue that gave you some advantage going into the last challenge. One could argue that, but I would argue in return that the shooting wasn't really the difficult part of that challenge. Sure, it mattered, but the throw was really the difficult part and if you didn't have the throw it didn't matter how well you could shoot a shotgun.

For example in my last throw when I threw 5 birds, I had a particularly awful throw and one of the birds actually ran into the other right after it left my hand and broke. Once it breaks leaving your hand you're not allowed to shoot it. So when that one broke, it made it so I couldn't even shoot those. They were out of play because my throw was so bad.

We were given an allotted amount of time to practice. you have X minutes of practice or 25 rounds. I used like 80%-90% of my time with Scott Robertson, he was the expert, just practicing my throw. Because I knew that was what it was going to be all about, but they wouldn't let us practice the throw while holding the gun. They wanted that to be something we'd never done before. They wanted to keep throwing us tricks and stuff. So that's why when we went back to the house I grabbed the gun off the mantle, it was a little prop gun, and I went and grabbed the Boccie balls and went and threw Boccie balls up on a hillside to try to get a motion down. It was really all about the throw.

Did you ever let your guard down? After the elimination challenge, did you ever just stop and go "OK, now I've got a break"? Honestly, I was just excited I got to unpack my bags again. When they voted for me I was as much pissed that I was going to the elimination as I was pissed that I had to pack my bags again. That's just frustrating...

...because you've done this three times now and you've had to pack and unpack every time- Yeah! Now granted, Brad had done it the same number of times; he went against Bill and he went against Frank. Brad and I both were packing our bags for the third time. It was just so aggravating. Mentally, you're packing your bags, it's just a sign of going home. So, you think "I'm packing my bags. Am I going to unpack them at home? Am I going to unpack them back here in the mansion later tonight? I don't know." It's just very mentally draining.

That's one thing Caleb mentioned was just how difficult it was to get mentally in the game what with the drama and the threat of getting sent home. Obviously with your ability to focus you've really been able to get in there and stick with it. Sure, so on the firing line it was a whole different story if you talk to me. But in the house? There's a lot of drama, I'm even involved in it most of the time. I'm pissing people off left and right, inadvertently albeit. I'm making people angry here or there, but get me on the firing line put a firearm in my hands and I'm going to forget about all of that, I'm going to focus on what I need to do to make a perfect shot.

And and the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what drama or interpersonal conflicts are going on. If you simply show up and continue to out shoot everybody and make those perfect shots, you'll go right on until the end. Yeah, you know that's the theory. Chris on the blue team actually said, "Kelly, if I was you I wouldn't even shoot for the team any more. I'd put my bullets in the dirt."

And for a second that seems for a second, that seems like a vengeful "these guys are out to get me" tactic that might work. I'm not a vengeful person, but for a second or two something like that really seems like an attractive idea. Now, it's not something I could do, I'm much more sportsman-like than that, and I think that's been shown. But it would be hilarious.

Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about your experience in the shooting sports and for giving us some insights into Top Shot. Hopefully we'll get to talk again after you've won the $100,000 grand prize. I sure hope so.

Kelly Bachand is a college student attending Washington State University where he is studying electrical engineering. He competes in Palma rifle competitions and is currently a member of the US National Rifle Team.