Rules Insights

There is an old saying in our sport: “There are those that have DQ’d and those that will DQ.” It’s true, as near as I can tell. I made it almost eight years before my first called DQ. I actually SHOULD have been DQ’d at my second match and several more times along the way but I was not. Let’s talk about this whole disqualification thing and why I made it eight years (and ended up calling the DQ on myself, by the way).

A recent post about scoring when a squib occurs brought up another question that several range officers asked. Since a squib is not considered a shot because the bullet didn’t pass completely through the barrel of the firearm, is it a disqualification if a competitor has an accidental discharge that turns out to be a squib?

USPSA matches allow for competitors to challenge scoring and penalty calls and a couple other things, but there is a process. The goal of this post is to provide some basic information to both range officials and competitors about how arbitration works. Arbitrations rarely occur, but everyone needs to know how the process works for when it does happen.

USPSA has had a certified ammunition program in some form for quite some time. See rule 5.8 in the 2021 USPSA Competition Rules. Currently, there are 9 approved vendors who can supply certified ammunition in almost every caliber common to a USPSA match, from PCC-specific ammunition to fodder for Open guns. But, what happens if you choose to use certified ammunition?

We see a lot of questions regarding various handguns and the Production Gun List because a word, maybe two, in the handgun name do not appear specifically in the list under that manufacturer. In short, the majority of these are approved because they belong to the same family as an already approved handgun. Let’s dig deeper.