Submitted by Bill Aston

A bolting cottontail, a gray squirrel scrambling from high limb to limb, the Russian boar, the jaguar of South America, or maybe the wildebeest or leopard of the “Dark Continent” of Africa…each are challenging quarry in their own way. But arguably, the most difficult prey for the rifleman might very well be small, stationary barnyard animals of Outer Floydale. At least that was the sense left with most shooters at the first ever “Smallbore Rifle Metallic Silhouette Match” held at the Dillon County Rifle & Gun Club range this past Sunday, September 18, 2011.

Five DCR&GC members and five visiting guests enjoyed the great weather and fellowship of other shooting enthusiasts during the Sunday afternoon event. A lot of lead was sent downrange, but “hits” on the small metal targets were infrequent for most participants in this challenging new event for the club.

“Siluetas Metalicas” is a shooting discipline that is derived from an old Mexican sport dating back to the early 1800’s, when live animals were staked out at varying distances as targets. The modern version of the game utilizes metal cutouts of animals as targets in place of live animals. For the “smallbore” version of this type of match, competitors shoot .22-caliber rifles at four stages of fire: 1) Gallina (chickens) at 40 meters; 2) Javalina (pigs) at 60 meters; 3) Guajalote (turkeys) at 77 meters; and 4) Borrego (rams) at 100 meters. Shooters are given two minutes to shoot five rounds at a bank of five targets from the offhand (standing) position. There are two banks of targets for each stage, totaling 40 targets for the match.

Shooters in the DCR&GC match competed in either the “scoped rifle” class or the “iron sights rifle” class, but all found this to be a true test of their marksmanship skills. The kill count was low, but all participants enjoyed the challenging day of shooting. Complete match results are listed in the table below (click to view at full size):