‘Practical’ Gun Game Proposed for Olympics

Firearm enthusiasts from around the world who organize run-and-gun competitions--once commonly known as “combat” shooting and often featuring human-shaped targets--are trying to persuade the International Olympic Committee to let them compete in the Olympic Games.

The 60-nation International Practical Shooting Confederation has been trying to persuade the committee to accept the competition as a sport for the last two years, President Nick Alexakos of Canada said Tuesday.

Though now referred to as “practical” shooting to avoid the negative connotations of the word combat, the international game pits shooters armed with assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and shotguns against imaginary adversaries in the form of human-shaped targets. Children as young as 9 compete in the United States.

“It’s a running-and-gunning type of deal,” said Andy Hollar, president of the 14,000-member U.S. Practical Shooting Assn.

In a typical American competition, a shooter jumps up from a prone position, grabs a gun from a table drawer and starts firing away, Hollar said. The U.S. group is sanctioned by Alexakos’s international confederation.

In an Australian competition, a shooter must also carry a person for 100 yards, “as if rescuing a buddy,” Hollar said.

Competitors in the contests shoot at a variety of targets, including “tombstone-shaped targets that roughly represents a humanoid shape,” Hollar said. There is also a lollipop-shaped steel target “that falls down when you hit it,” he said.

Competitors shoot from behind walls with cutout windows and doors and around corners. Shooters get higher scores when they hit spots where the head or heart would be located in a person.

The confederation scored a major victory last October when it persuaded the IOC-sanctioned Hellenic Shooting Assn. to host a practical shooting exhibition for the 2004 games in Athens.

Alexakos said all IOC members and other Olympic officials have been invited. Although the exhibition is not sanctioned directly by the IOC, the Hellenic association approval is considered an important step toward winning legitimacy.

Efforts to include the competition in the Olympics has sparked outrage among gun control organizations.

“This type of shooting is for military maneuvers in NATO. An organization [the Olympics] that is supposed to celebrate peace should not be sponsoring military shooting,” said Naomi Paiss, spokeswoman for Handgun Control Inc.

Critics say including the competition in the Olympics would be a way of legitimizing weapons and fighting gun control.

Philip Alpers, a New Zealand firearms researcher, and the Washington-based Violence Policy Center have done an in-depth study on the sport of practical shooting. They plan a series of press conferences Thursday in Washington and other world capitals.

Bill McGeveran, a spokesman for the center, said its findings “should persuade IOC that violent fantasy and combat weaponry have no place at the Olympics.” He declined Tuesday to release any details.

Although the U.S. still uses targets that resemble human shapes, Alexakos said his organization no longer uses them.

The competition, he said, is simply “shooting at as many targets and as fast as you can.”

IOC officials in Lausanne, Switzerland, declined to say whether they favor the sport, but noted that IOC approval is a years-long process.

The practical shooting contests contrast with existing Olympic gun competition, which is limited to skeet and trap shooting, air-gun shooting and .22-caliber weapons. The contests also include the hunting-based shooting biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing and shooting, and the modern pentathlon. The pentathlon, a sport rooted in ancient civilizations’ military messengers, requires competitors to shoot at stationary targets, fence, swim, ride horses over jumps and run a 3,000-meter, cross-country course.

Alexakos said his shooting confederation began talking with IOC officials, including its sports director Gilbert Felli, two years ago.

Alexakos said the contact with Felli was not encouraging.

Although the name has been changed from combat shooting, the confederation’s constitution lists “principles and objectives” implying that the competition is designed to simulate military, law enforcement and self-defense shootouts.

Targets “reflect the general size and shape of such objects as the firearm may be reasonably be called upon to hit in their primary intended use,” including human enemies.

Alexakos said “those principles are 25 years old,” when the major thrust of the contest was law enforcement applications.

“The fathers of practical shooting were primarily interested in law enforcement and self-defense,” he said.