Range Officer Certification
At the World Championship of Historic 3-Gun put on by the Oklahoma Rough Riders in April, they put on an H3G Range Officer Certification, Phase II course on the first day of the match. This allowed all the RO Candidates to complete Phase I at home before the competition and then complete Phase III during the two days of the main match. Congratulations to our new Range Officers and thanks to those who attended Phase II as a review.
If you want to take the Range Officer Certification Course and are coming to the Midwestern Historic 3-Gun Championship in Illinois, we will hold the RO Phase II course on Friday July 17 at the range. This will allow all candidates to do the RO Phase III on July 18 and 19 during the competition. To register for this course, contact us at rangeofficer@historic3gun.com. Ask us for the Phase I material. Complete this at home and submit it. We will then expect you for Phase II in Illinois. The cost of the course is $35 including your RO badge, payable when you attend Phase II.
NOTE: If you are already a certified H3G Range Officer, you are aware that you need to be knowledgeable about the firearms being used in order to safely assist the shooter through the course of fire. Therefore, you should review the great videos put together by Dusty Boddams for some of the lesser known handguns that are allowed in H3G. These videos are only about a minute each and are a great learning opportunity for everyone. Go to: Rules & Safety – Historic 3-Gun
Match Director’s Guide
Our match director’s guide is nearly ready for publication. We expect it to be ready within a few weeks. Watch the website for the announcement.
World Championship of Historic 3-Gun
Thanks to Hondo Tweed and all the other Oklahoma Rough Riders for hosting this match April 17-19, 2026. It was a great shoot, great food as usual and lots of fun. The rain even kept away during our shooting on Sunday. Thanks once again to Big John Elder for his world-famous chicken fried steak dinner. To see video of this competition thanks to Sarsaparilla follow this link: 26 H3G World Championship OKC
Shooters enjoyed the great silhouette range at the Oklahoma City Gun Club with targets out to 550 years.
Shooters could shoot any of the Historic 3-Gun rifle caliber rifles on knockdown targets. The range of the targets was based on the rifle used. What a great facility they have.
Shooters also enjoyed the clay range, shooting sporting clays and the famous Oklahoma Duck You Suckers clay match where each shooter was faced with a flight of clays coming at them while they were armed with a fully loaded model 12.
The importance of monthly matches
Here in Texas, we just shot our regular monthly match that we hold the third Saturday of each month. It was a great match, and everyone enjoyed it. Festerin Sore came down from Oklahoma. We always enjoy shooting with him and all of our visitors. We had a Bolt Action Military Match (BAMM), with 10 shots. It was fast and challenging. After the match, many shooters went to the BBQ place for a “debriefing”.
Why am I putting this in writing? What’s my point? Just this! Monthly matches are the backbone of Historic 3-Gun (H3G). Large matches (2 or 3 days in duration) are held on an annual basis and there will be more of these each year. The large matches are great fun to attend. Folks with the same interests gather, to have fun shooting both the main and specialty match competitions. You really get your money’s worth.
The monthly match is where practice, coupled with competition continues to happen. This is where grassroots change and experimentation happens. Many great ideas are developed at these very matches. Just as importantly, there are ideas that sound great on paper, but when you put them into practice, turn out to be real stinkers. Our monthly matches continue to be a hot bed of development while maintaining a high fun count for each stage. We are not trying to make you a better shooter. That’s the shooter’s job. We want to entertain and inspire our shooters. We do high round counts at our monthlies because that is what our shooters want. Most of our people are RO certified and that allows everyone to rotate in and out of all the different duties, so no one gets worn out. Lots of ideas are put to the test, changed and retested during a monthly H3G match. If you have a match within driving distance, please support these folks. If you don’t have an H3G club within driving distance, why don’t you consider gathering a few friends together and start a small club.
Starting a shooting club, despite what you’ve been told, is not that complicated or should I say, it can be as simple or as complicated as you desire. First off you need somewhere to shoot. A developed range is nice but not necessary. A place to set up a single stage will work perfectly for a starting club. If you have an agreeable range owner who already does 2- or 3-gun matches the world just got easier for you. A range owner can easily be sold on H3G, especially when they see H3G’s tried and tested rules and total emphasis on safety. Or, you could have access to an old sand pit and have just as much fun. You don’t need facades and fancy props. You do need imagination and good quality steel targets. A great set of H3G rules along with all these videos on the website will point you in the right direction. To put on matches, you need to get liability insurance. It’s easy. It’s a one-page application and very affordable. As a club develops, things can be added. We use PractiScore on an iPad, and our new timers directly record the score automatically. These new timers have been a great asset and are very easy to use. Something else we did away with is paper scoring as backup. It’s faster, easier and more accurate to whip out your cell phone and take a picture of the scores on the iPad after each stage is completed for backup.
Thinking about stages and steel targets, some folks shy away from putting on matches because of “all that work and all that steel you have to buy and setup”. When you are starting out you don’t need very much steel to put on a good match. What’s needed is to think about the most that can be done with
Getting the round count higher where shooting is interesting and exciting is not by loading the range with bunches of steel but rather using color coded targets and strategic target placement. For instance, if you code blue targets to be triple tapped and whites to be double tapped. One suggestion is to place three, painted blue, for the rifle at 20 to 25 yards and for pistol targets, place four targets at 8 yards and another set of 4 at 15 yards. In each set of the pistol targets, paint three targets blue and one white on each set. This could be shot the first time as: rifle in hand, engage the rifle targets as required (9 rounds). Shooter engages targets and makes rifle safe, then draws their pistol and engages the spread out and staggered four target set (11 rounds minimum) and then moving to the second set of targets engages them with minimum 11 rounds and then moves to a position (limited by the stage description) to engage the rifle targets with the pistol for a minimum of nine rounds. Congratulations! With an open round count stage our intrepid shooter just engaged the equivalent of 31 pistol targets and nine rifle targets with 11 pieces of steel.
The scenario can be changed with minimal or no steel movement for a nice four stage match. For the shotgun targets, you can shoot the same static targets, but it knocks off the paint quickly. A couple of automatic reset targets will work for the shotgun but if that’s not in the budget, the next time you’re driving by a place where they are installing yellow or orange 1” gas pipe, stop and ask them for the cutoff ends. This is tough material and will handle a lot of shotgun hits. Cut these pieces about a foot long, call them snakes and have a large time shooting them. You can also make a circle and stick a piece of pipe in the middle and engage until the pipe is bounced outside of the circle. Charcoal briquettes are another great overlooked target, reacting exceptionally well when hit!
For questions or more assistance please contact us at members@historic3gun.com.
I’m Dusty Boddams and that’s the Boddam line