Originally Posted by
JonInWA
As one thread participant has, one can always choose the "screw you, I had the means/foresight to accumulate a sufficient stock of match ammunition" approach, but I'll suggest it's an approach that's likely to be of limited success, particularly over time/scheduled matches.
First, because your matches will likely face a diminishing pool of participants.
Second, because that participant pool will be of experienced shooters, and preclusive of new/newer shooters.
Third, because some of us who are more experienced shooters have other resource comittments which direct that we have limited stocks of stored/accumulated ammunition, and may only have enough on hand for a limited amount of matches at a given time.
Here's reality, at least in my neck of the woods (Seattle metro) at the current time (mid-September): Range/match ball amunition in virtually all of the popular calibers (i.e., .38 Special, 9mm, .40, and ,45 ACP) is severely constrained and/or totally unavailable, both at the LGS source and on-line sites. In my opinion, for sports like IDPA and ASI (and GSSF, etc.) to continue and flourish with a reasonable amount of participants, a "best practices" approach will need to be to design good challenging scenarios with lower round counts-which, by the way, is most probably more significantly relevant to the real-world siituations one is likely to encounter.
I'm slated to be an IDPA Match Director for our October match, and I plan on likely having 6 stages with a total mimimum roundcount of 6-10 rounds per stage.
Best, Jon