Categories
While various sanctioning organizations have differing categories, typically such categories would include the following:
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- Traditional - Shooters use only revolvers with fixed sights.
In 2009, The Single Action Shooting Society split the Traditional category into the following categories:
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- Cowboy - for shooters of all ages.
- Wrangler - for shooters 36 years of age or older.
- Forty-Niner - for shooters 49 years of age or older.
- Senior - Shooters over 60
- Silver senior - Shooters over 65
- Elder Statesman - Shooters over 70
- Modern - This equipment-based category was eliminated in 2009.
- Frontier Cartridge - Shooters use black powder rather than smokeless powder in all their guns.
- Frontiersman - Shooter uses cap and ball revolvers, shot duelist style, and side-by-side double-barrel or lever-action shotguns.
- B-Western - Shooters wear clothing inspired by the B-Western films of the '30s and '40s, starring Roy Rogers, William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd, and others. "Buscadero" type gunbelt/holster rigs are required, and the shooter must wear spurs.
- Wild Bunch - based on popular Western film "The Wild Bunch"; shooters use Colt 1911 pistol instead of revolvers, use lever action rifles, and use Winchester Model 1897 shotgun instead of double-barreled shotgun.
In addition, there often are categories based on how the shooter fires his guns, such as:
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- Duelist - Shooter uses only one hand to fire revolvers.
- Gunfighter - Shooter uses two revolvers at once when the stage allows, otherwise shoots right-side revolver with right hand only and left-side revolver with left hand only.
All of these categories may also be shot as women's, junior, or senior categories. There is generally no men's category per se, and women may shoot in the same category as the men.
There are many other categories, especially at the local level, but the above are representative of the main types of categories one finds at cowboy action shooting events.
In addition to percussion (cap and ball) weapons, many firearms are center-fire .32 caliber or larger with revolvers and rifles chambered in .38 Special and .45 Colt being very popular. Ammunition is generally loaded at medium to full power levels, although many junior shooters or women prefer to shoot lighter calibers (such as .32 and .38). A noted trend among some shooters is to use light loads to reduce recoil and improve their times, this tends to run contrary to the "Spirit of the Game".
Read more about this topic: Cowboy Action Shooting
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)