Once upon a time, in the days before people photographed their lunch, did yoga, and said, “Dilly-dilly,” before the days of the 3-gun match and the 2-gun match, and a white picket fence with 2 cars and 3 AR’s in every home, there was a thing called Offhand Pistol Shooting. The deuce, you say? Yep. Before the conundrum of Isosceles, or Weaver, or CAR, or Modified Weaver, people would shoot a pistol with only one hand, standing rather sideways, with the non-shooting hand placed nonchalantly in their pocket or behind their back, or otherwise out of the way, and some of them were pretty good at it, and they constructed large scale competitions around it, and some of them eventually bought Bo-Mar ribs.
What is a Bo-Mar rib? It’s a great solution to a problem most modern shooters don’t encounter. Please humor me.
When the modern shooter equips him or herself for a shooting competition, it is most likely with the goal of Action Pistol, Defensive Pistol, Steel Challenge or a 3-Gun match of some kind, where you are transitioning between pistol, rifle, and shotgun. Those are a lot of fun, and very popular with the modern shooter, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about Bullseye shooting, also referred to as Precision Pistol. And ribs. We’re talking about those, too.
Bullseye became popular prior to WWII, and remains an Olympic event today. It is also an annual competition at Camp Perry. Bullseye requires a massive amount of concentration and skill, and typically a specialized gun, with classes from .22 Rimfire up to .45 ACP. This is something you can do with a stock pistol, by way of getting started, but you’d likely escalate pretty quickly to something custom.
In the gun shop, we see competition guns come through with some regularity, but the BoMar doesn’t drift through very often. First of all, the company is out of business, and secondly, there are more modern options for your Bullseye Pistol, with most shooters trending towards some kind of optic. So when a nifty little Springfield showed up with a BoMar endowment a few weeks ago, I jumped at the chance to try it out.
The BoMar rib, or any other rib, serves to both add weight to the slide, and provide rigidity. It also lengthens your sight radius a bit, and comes with adjustable target sights. I generally shoot combat or carry-style pistols, so this was a bit of a different experience.
A standard Precision Pistol target has a bulls-eye of up to 8" for the 50-yard shots, and it's around 5.5" for the 25-yard shooting. Not having one of those handy, I grabbed one of our range targets that has about 1.5" diameter X-Ring, and then concentric 1" rings going out from there. I slipped down to the range, ran the target out to 10 yards, and using a standard Isosceles Stance, proceeded to stack 5 holes in about a two-inch (give or take) group, 3 out of 4 times. Well, that’s phenomenal precision if you’re shooting your carry pistol at an intruder in a dark house, but not terribly impressive when using a gun someone built to shoot offhand at distances up to 50 yards.
Meh. Who cares? I’ve got more important stuff to do…..