SI Covers Long Range High Power Championships

(GunReports.com) -- There's a great piece about the National Long Range High Power Championships on the Sports Illustrated website, SI.com:

Sherri Gallagher is 26 years old and has dark hair, pretty brown eyes and a shy smile. She likes Top 40 music, is unfailingly polite and occasionally wears her hair in pigtails. She is also so proficient with a rifle that if you were standing 1,000 yards away from her -- which is to say, 10 football fields or almost two thirds of a mile -- she could put a bullet within 10 inches of your heart 100 out of 100 times.

Not that she would, of course, but she could.

At the moment, Gallagher is prone on the ground and staring down the scope of her .308 Palma rifle at one of 40-odd competition targets on the horizon. It is August in northern Ohio and the air is gelatinous from the heat, yet Gallagher is wearing a sweatshirt under her Army fatigues so that she can cushion her shoulder and muffle the vibration of her heartbeat. At the moment, her pulse is so low that she could be mistaken for being asleep, and she is modulating her breathing to create eight-second windows of physiological stillness. This is important, for even the slightest deviation in the position of the muzzle -- say, the width of a piece of paper -- can send her bullet off course by as much as a foot.

To read the rest of the piece, click here.

Reader Comments

This is one of the best articles I've read on conventional competition, including those published by gun magazines. This reporter really nailed a number of great points and clearly did some solid research. Kudos to SI!

One pull quote was especially telling: "Though commonly thought of as a lobbying entity today, the NRA was originally formed as a way to train America's gun owners in response to what was viewed as poor marksmanship..."

Even this SI reporter realizes the folks at Fairfax have forgotten their purpose.

Comment by: FUNshoot | September 9, 2010