For the purpose of this thread, all I was after was a simple one-sentence definition, such as what we've come up with up above. I'm also interested in what the world championship levels are..... I've got a lot more reading to do.
World-class scores in Free Pistol are generally in the 570 out of 600 range.
In the Free Pistol events you shot at, what kind of results were people getting (in terms of distance to target, and group size - or was it only one or two shots, scored by how close to the bullseye they were?
Well, Free Pistol is shot at 50 meters. Targets are scored in five round strings. Depending on how the targets are set up, you either shoot five and hit the button to bring the target back, post up another one, and send it down, or you mount multiple targets on one board, and shoot five at each one.
I'm guessing that it was assumed you already had the gun sighted in, meaning group size wasn't the key factor - instead, it was simply how many points you scored
Basically, in order to score well, you have to shoot well. The ten ring is just under two inches and the nine ring is about four inches. So the sport is all about shooting as tight of a group as possible, from an offhand position at 50 meters. The gun is already sighted in, but you do get a number of sighters before you begin the actual match. IIRC, I think you get five of those.
(Did any of those competitive guns fire 45 ammo, or do they use something else, perhaps because the ammo is more accurate?)
Nope. Free Pistol is only shot with single-shot .22 handguns. When I took part in matches in college, I used a
Russian-built TOZ Free Pistol.
After that, when I did compete in these matches, I used a S&W M46. That's not really an ideal gun for Free Pistol, but I wasn't shooting at a high enough level that it would have made much of a difference.
A couple of years ago, CDNN blew out a whole mess of TOZ Free Pistols and some people picked them up. Gun blogger Xavier bought one and did a pretty good writeup on the accuracy of the pistol from a plinking standpoint, which can be read
here.
For a brief overview of what the sport itself looks like,
Pilkington Guns has a good writeup about Free Pistol.
When it comes to competing in the ISSF shooting sports in the US, generally you'll find that they'll hold two or three matches at the same event, so it's not unheard of to compete in a 25 Meter Pistol match, 10 Meter Air Pistol match, and a 50 Meter Free Pistol match over the course of a weekend.