Rob Reed at examiner.com published a lengthy interview with former Top Shot competitor Phil Morden. The self-taught marksman had a word or two to say about Jake Zweig’s assertion that the competition was a sham due to equipment unreliability. “Now, with the Infinity pistols, we each had our own pistol which we sighted in during the practice. We had a certain number of rounds for practice. You take five, six rounds, to sight it in to make sure your hitting on paper. Taran Butler helped us out with that. He was great, got everybody dialed in. Jake was hitting close to the bullseye with the pistol. You know, for Jake to say that the guns weren’t working all the time, yeah, they didn’t work all the time . . .
So while Jake might not known how to run the gun, but the gun she don’t run. Morden reckons it’s no biggie.
But, some of that can be operator error and some of that can be just that the gun isn’t running as it should be. I had some problems with my Infinity and I fixed them as fast as possible and ended up shooting one less target than the guy who was in third place. So, I could argue the same case. That my firearm didn’t work at certain points. I had failures to go into battery and when I hit the slide home it took a few seconds. I could argue the point that I missed out on three or four targets because of that which took me out of the top three. But, you have to understand that it’s a gun and it’s not always going to work.
Yes, but– random mechanical failures in various firearms doesn’t exactly create a level playing field. Unless all the guns have the same failure rate. Which they didn’t (Jake says at least one gun performed flawlessly). Again: the competitors weren’t sharing a gun. So while the competition wasn’t rigged, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it fair. Fair enough?