Although our new Club situated between San Miguel de Allende, Gto. and Dolores Hidalgo, Gto. (think "Dolores tile") is just getting started, we already have an established "open" competition/practice program on the 3rd Saturday of every month. Based on a combination of NRA Action Pistol / PPC - type courses with a small IPSC-style sidematch, it should be a good learning experience for the many new shooters we're getting as well as lots of fun for the "usual suspects" who have been around for a while now.

In Mexico, the .38 Special revolver is King, as a civilian cannot aspire to a more powerful caliber. In automatics, the .380 is as high as you go. If you have read that in Mexico the .38 Super is legal -- well -- it was until 1974. After that, you could not buy one and anyone who had one before 1974 was "grandfathered" into only being allowed to keep it. It could not be transported to-and-from a range. So no .38 Supers in the traditional sense.

Any 9 m.m. or .38 Super auto can be "modified" to shoot the .380 Cal or Super Cal cartridge which is just a .380 casing loaded with longer 9 m.m. bullets to a length of 1.050 OAL and fired from a 9 m.m. or Super Auto with an appropriately cut chamber. From a fully-supported 1911 barrel, .38 Super factory power is quite obtainable. Use small rifle primers for that, by the way, and only a fully-supported chamber. Regular 9 m.m. power is easily done and regular small pistol primers will do.

Since Mexico only allows a maximum of 10 firearms in your possession, guns have to double-up in duty. Your Bowling Pin or IPSC gun may well have to be your PPC gun as well. Most firearms are not "over-modified". Since the regular factory-powered .380's often show up for competition, they are often horrendously under-powered and have problems knocking down Pepper Poppers set heavily enough to defy a light breeze. This quickly takes away any magazine capacity advantage they showed up with. Courses are designed with this in mind if they are more than the 6-shot only NRA or PPC-style events.

Some new and interesting guns are showing up at the Club these days. Here are two new-members' guns, a nice 6 inch Model 19 that has become a 15, and a Colt Officer's Model. I photographed them with my own Model 14 Heavy Barrel as they'll all make excellent guns for our events. I really like the grips on the Colt Officer's Model, although we'll have to find another set we can cut-up a bit to allow easier extraction of the case closest to the frame and allow for better speedloader insertion. These particular original grips are too nice to sand away on:



Crane markings on the 19/15 and my original 14, although mine doesn't show as well. But it started as a 14-4 and still is one although I ordered and got one of the over-stock Heavy Barrels when they were still around and installed it with a Read Bead sight. I like it a lot.



We shoot two classes, "Service" and "Target" class. Revolvers or Automatics with 4 inch barrels are Service Class guns. General Production firearms with longer barrels are considered Target Class guns although revolvers with fixed sights and generally unmodified from factory issue are allowed to compete as Service Class. We don't care, we're not that picky. This 4 inch Heavy Duty and 5 inch Model 10 would be equally considered to be Service Class guns.



This modified Glock 25 in .380 Cal -- tactically equivilent to a Glock 19 in power and accuracy -- is a Service Class gun:



This modified Glock 25 in .380 Cal would be considered a Target Class gun.



This 8 3/8 inch Model 19 round butt is definitely a Target Class revolver.



Cooper's rules, printed in Spanish on the range entry-building, for those people who don't want to be too far away from Cooper.



For all the NRA Action/PPC - style events, regular .38 Special ammo or .380 Factory ammo (in unmodified automatics) is good enough to come and play. For the IPSC or Pin events, only the .38 Heavy Duty round is powerful enough. Even full-bore .38 Super duplication loads in the 1911's isn't powerful enough to take the pins off reliably. Guns like this Model 27/23 with a 7-shot Baumann cylinder are built up for the "unlimited" class in Mexican Pin shooting.



For those of us who came here from Canada or the U.S. in search of perfect weather and year-long summers, the draconian Mexican gun laws have been a hinderance to continued happy shooting. But by "chipping away" at the system and taking a few short-cuts, we've made it into something that we can live with as opposed to the alternative. As we find down here in Mexico, once you give up those gun-rights, it's awful difficult to get them back.