Which way should this decision fall? Yesterday at the match there was also an interesting event that of course as Murphy would have it, I would be the CRO on the stage at that time. I have attached the stage description at the bottom, but here’s a quick rundown of the stage. So, as you can see there were two activated disappearing targets, T1 and T9. When the steel was dropped they would appear and disappear. A particular shooter in his effort to strike the target nailed it just after it disappeared. When I first saw it I thought miss. He began to argue that it was a hit. However when I started to inspect it I maintained my ruling. The bullet actually struck the back of the target and traveled to the front. If you inspect the front of the target you will see that there is no grease mark from the bullet however one is clearly visible on the back side. The USPSA rule book states the following: 9.5.8: Hits visible on a scoring paper target or no-shoot, which are the result of shots fired through the rear of the target or no-shoot, will not count for score or penalty, as the case may be. It begs the question of what happens with a perfect edge hit. The following might apply. 9.5.9: Hits upon scoring or no-shoot paper targets, must completely pass through the target to be considered a valid hit and count for score or penalty. It could be argued that the bullet did not completely pass through the target. For the edge hit to count it must completely bifurcate the target. I don’t know. In this case it was more back to front so it was easy to call, what if it had been the other way though? Front to back or I hadn’t had that nice piece of wood to help indicate the direction of travel. Is it impressive, yeah, the question remains though, how the hell do you score it? Here is the stage description. Continue reading →