ny32182
Member
I could really care less what anyone's day job is; police/etc are not any more committed to attaining great shooting skills because they carry a gun on the job than they are to developing great driving skills because they drive a car on the job.
My "beef" with the show, which I strongly suspected from the start, confirmed after talking to a small handful of prospective contestants, is that the "competition" aspect of it really isn't, for two reasons:
1) They pick contestants from the application pool based 90% on personality and potential to generate the aforementioned drama, with very little or no regard for shooting skills, and
2) The competitions on the actual show are at least 50% crapshoot due to lack of any real time whatsoever to develop familiarity with the equipment: Example: go shoot this rifle in "competition", but since you didn't get to confirm the zero first, it could really be going anywhere. Pick anyone even moderately competent with the rifle, take one shot, and there it is. Basically anyone could "win" based on the amount of uncertainty there is this aspect.
Being viewed from the perspective of actual shooters, this can obviously be frustrating, but that is because we have more intimate knowledge of the topic that can tell us where they are either screwing up or omitting key information from what is being presented. I bet by the same token, fishermen don't like Deadliest Catch and motorcycle builders don't like West Coast Customs, etc. It is just another show for the mass market (those uninformed on the topic). Same plot, rotate subject matter, and you could produce basically any of the reality shows out there. That said I'm glad it is on the mass market and portraying competition with guns in a positive light.
My "beef" with the show, which I strongly suspected from the start, confirmed after talking to a small handful of prospective contestants, is that the "competition" aspect of it really isn't, for two reasons:
1) They pick contestants from the application pool based 90% on personality and potential to generate the aforementioned drama, with very little or no regard for shooting skills, and
2) The competitions on the actual show are at least 50% crapshoot due to lack of any real time whatsoever to develop familiarity with the equipment: Example: go shoot this rifle in "competition", but since you didn't get to confirm the zero first, it could really be going anywhere. Pick anyone even moderately competent with the rifle, take one shot, and there it is. Basically anyone could "win" based on the amount of uncertainty there is this aspect.
Being viewed from the perspective of actual shooters, this can obviously be frustrating, but that is because we have more intimate knowledge of the topic that can tell us where they are either screwing up or omitting key information from what is being presented. I bet by the same token, fishermen don't like Deadliest Catch and motorcycle builders don't like West Coast Customs, etc. It is just another show for the mass market (those uninformed on the topic). Same plot, rotate subject matter, and you could produce basically any of the reality shows out there. That said I'm glad it is on the mass market and portraying competition with guns in a positive light.