CLANG! Metallic Silhouette Shooting Competition Kicks Off in OK this Friday

The International Handgun Metallic Silhouette Association will be hosting a world championship shooting competition that starts this Friday and runs through July 20 a few miles north of Arcadia, Oklahoma, Outdoors Blog reports. More than 600 shooters from the US, Canada, Australia, and Brazil have entered the competition.

For those of you who spend all of your time shooting paper targets, boy are you missing out. Metallic silhouette shooting takes the competition to a whole new level of fun. So, what makes it different?

Jim Fields, a world champion shooter who’s looking forward to the upcoming event, explains the visceral appeal of hitting metal targets: it’s an “exhilarating shooting sport that has involved big-bore handguns that fire on half-inch steel targets ranging from 50 meters out to a distance of 200 meters. Yes, I said 200 meters. That’s two football fields plus two end-zones with a handgun.”

They fire big-bore guns at 10 steel silhouettes each of chickens at 50 meters, pigs at 100 meters, turkeys at 150 meters, and rams at 200 meters. One interesting quirk of the sport is that each of these metallic animals appears to be approximately the same size to the shooter because the larger targets are also farther away.

Hitting these targets, Fields explains, is a hoot and a half. “Here is a taste of what silhouette competition is all about. You level down on a turkey at 150 yards. A low hit will take the leg out from under the steel bird with a gratifying CLANG! A hit high on the back of the second turkey sends it tumbling wildly end over end.”

That does sound a lot more fun than poking a hole through a piece of paper, doesn’t it?

For updates, stay tuned to Guns.com. For more information on the International Handgun Metallic Silhouette Association, visit their website. For all breaking gun news, keep browsing Guns.com’s news feeds.