Iconic competition shooter and trainer Rob Leatham has been named the winner of the inaugural NRA Golden Bullseye Competitor Award, which honors a competitive shooter who not only displays outstanding performance in competition, but also gives back by offering guidance and support to the next generation of competitive shooters.
The newest NRA Golden Bullseye award, the recipient of the Competitor Award is determined by the Shooting Sports USA editorial team. With a career spanning more than 40 years, Rob Leatham was the obvious choice to receive the inaugural award. One of the best competition shooters of all time, he’s an eight-time IPSC World Champion and eight-time World Speed Shooting champion, along with 11 Bianchi Cup wins under his belt in multiple divisions. Additionally, Leatham has won a mind-boggling 24 USPSA National Championship titles, plus seven IPSC World Championship titles.
Leatham made history in 1985 when he became the only shooter to win practical pistol shooting’s Triple Crown—the Bianchi Cup Action Pistol Championship, the IPSC U.S. Nationals and the Steel Challenge Nationals—all in the same year.
Below is Editor in Chief John Parker’s interview with Rob Leatham, only edited for length and clarity.
John Parker: You are the most winning action-pistol competitor in history, and you’ve been in the shooting sports for four decades. How has the action-pistol landscape changed over the years?
Rob Leatham: When I was growing up all I wanted to do is shoot pistols. For whatever reason, I fell in love with the speed shooting games. In the beginning, all the practical pistol competitions were training and testing processes for what you would call self-defense or martial arts. In the beginning, it was, “How do we test what is a viable technique? What is good equipment. What is good training?”
I would say it was more realistic from the standpoint of nobody was trying to make it just a game. I was in the first generation of shooters that came in there and didn’t care about it being a martial art as much as just playing the game. All I cared about was playing the game. I was willing to make all the steps—whether practical or impractical—in order to excel at the game.
That’s probably the biggest change if you go to a match now. First off, shooters are phenomenally specialized. There are people who only shoot the Bianchi Cup, the people that only shoot the Steel Challenge. There are people that only shoot shotguns, or only shoot rifles or only shoot IPSC. In the beginning, there weren’t enough, I would say, “high-level matches” or “good matches” to keep you entertained for a year. If there was one, it was the IPSC Nationals. In 1981, which is the first year I attended the Nationals, that was the only big IPSC match of the year. It was kind of limiting. So, as a rule, we had to have a wider variety in our interests. And we’d shoot precision, we’d shoot rifles and shotguns, we’d shoot almost anything we could. I think that day and age created not a better shooter, but a more well-rounded shooter.
For me, I was a shooter, and I didn’t really care what we were shooting. I was already competition-oriented, having just got out of high school where I played basketball and ran track, and that same drive and effort went from “ball and stick sports” to shooting. I put in the same drive and the same work ethic from when I was playing basketball and running. I did it twice a day, or sometimes three times a day. When I got into shooting, it wasn’t something I did every now and then with my buddies. My basketball and track focus—all that energy went to shooting.
I think what changed in the sport is the seriousness of it, meaning it’s far more important that somebody in a self-defense situation is a good enough shot then that they win a match. Now, there are so many matches that it almost makes the competitions seem more important, especially more important to the organizations of the sport. USPSA has literally hundreds and hundreds of matches a year now. And at the high level, there are not only nationals, there are regionals, and there are area matches and state shoots that didn’t exist when I began. It just wasn’t there. If you went to the nationals and shot poorly, it was a year before you had a chance to come back at it.
JP: Do you think it’s better now?
RL: Oh, in some ways, vastly better. I would say the shooters—I would call them specialists, with very few exceptions, the guys that are specializing in their desired sport—are probably better than all. In the early days, there were always a few exceptional people. Before there were specialists, there were people who were good at one thing and not very good at others.
If you are a competition shooter now, it is better now, but the competition is much more difficult. You go to a national match now, there are probably 15 or 20 people who are at the top, and of them, the top 10 probably are winning virtually everything. So that hasn’t changed, but there weren’t 40 or 50 people that were going to shoot within 10% of the top score. Back in the old days, there was a pretty rapid drop off. When you got out of the top four or five shooters, it would go down fast. So is it better? Now, the shooters are better as a group, and they’re better from the standpoint of specialization, but they’re not better when you mix them, e.g., an IPSC shooter at the Bianchi Cup, or vice versa.
They were better in the old days, but that’s because we were masters of nothing, but good at everything. Now we have the masters of a specific thing and not good at the other things with some exceptions. That’s just what specialization does. There are a handful of guys that are really good at everything. When I grew up, we shot shotguns, rifles and pistols. I know shooters now that only have grown up shooting a certain type of pistol. When I grew up, if we went out shooting, practically everybody knew how to shoot everything. Now we have a generation of shooters that have never shot a 1911 before, which for old folks like me, is kind of amazing. They’ve grown up shooting the striker-fired, polymer-type pistols, and don’t have any experience with a double-action revolver or 1911 with a thumb safety.
JP: Did starting out that way give you an advantage?
RL: It was an advantage from the standpoint that it allowed me a vast experience level to build, so that my general level skills were probably much higher. Now that wouldn’t be an advantage if you deemed yourself a specialist, like if you only care about shooting IPSC or USPSA Open division, I’m not sure I can make an argument that you should spend much time with guns. I want to know my way around any kind of shooting. I don’t care what it is, because I’m just an overgrown plinker. If you really tie this down, that I was a good competition shooter, it was born out of the fact that I had good hand-eye coordination, good drive and I had an environment that helped me work towards that and the circumstances where I was at the right place at the right time to grow into that. If I were starting now, I just think it would be much harder to be good at everything and still be great at a single thing. I don’t know that I would tell a current IPSC Grand Master shooter that, “You’d learn a lot by going and shooting Bullseye,” or “You’d learn a lot by cross training shooting shotgun.” Few people have the makeup and the drive to be able to put that kind of effort into it.
JP: It depends on what your goals are, too.
RL: Yes, exactly. I suppose early on I fell in love with what we called it combat pistol shooting. You know, in the beginning there was IPSC or USPSA, Steel Challenge or NRA Action Shooting. Before that happened, we just called this combat shooting. We shot local matches and went out and practiced. We were playing gunfighter. We were playing competition gunfighter. It was just a different time. The things that we were working on were based on lessons learned from the self-defense side, which have evolved rapidly because we got to a point where everything that we’re doing in a match, none of it is a practical example, although the skills that make you a good competition shooter are very much same things that you would need in a fight.
Going back to when you asked the question, “Is it better now?” I suppose most people always want to look back and say, “Oh, it’s the good old days,” but it wasn’t better back then. I mean, it was pure from the standpoint that I wanted to shoot everything. Now, it’s fragmented. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but professional basketball players don’t go and try to play football. It’s an interesting question.
JP: How do you mentally prepare yourself for a big match?
RL: It’s a fight. Think of a match as a fight, and the fight isn’t against the other people. People think it is. You don’t beat people in a match. People lose to each other because nobody goes in there and just stomps everybody and shoots so much better. It’s all a series of subtle mistakes. With all things being equal, the person that makes the least number of mistakes is the one that’s going to win. The preparation for that requires an attitude where when things aren’t fun, you’re ready to fight. Yeah, for the shooter, shooters that go out there and say, “I’m here just to have fun.” I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that way. You know what’s fun? Shooting really well is fun. Hitting targets really fast is fun. At the end, if you know that you won, that was nice, but it was the battle that I was there for. If it was shoot the score, I’ll go out one day and I’ll shoot, and then you go and shoot the next day and we compare scores. And that’s not even interesting to me. It’s the battle. I want you there. I want us going through the same circumstances. So, I look at it as a fight.
It doesn’t have to be fun. A buddy of mine, an Arctic ice climber named Mark White, he wrote a book and said this to me: “Remember, Rob, it doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” And you know, when you’re practicing eight hours a day in Phoenix, Arizona, over the summer and it’s 120 degrees, it’s not fun—it’s just the cost of doing business. Skill—yes—and you have to be in the battle. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than I enjoy the fight. Maybe that’s why I’m a confrontational person.
JP: Do any of your victories from over the years stand out?
RL: Yes, but the things that might be a victory to me might not be what somebody else considers a victory. I remember clearly the stages for the first national championship I won, which was in 1983. I remember stages and most of the match. I have vivid memories of events that occurred after that. Not to sound cocky, but I won a lot of matches, but it wasn’t about the matches, it was the battles.
One of my favorite battles that ever occurred, I didn’t win. It was in 1994 and I was shooting at the USPSA Limited Nationals. The battle was with Jerry Barnhart, who was a nemesis through the early portion of my career. I lost the match, but I still remember it being one of the best battles. For whatever reason, I remember that more than I do dozens of other matches. I can’t really explain to you why, other than to say that was an exceptional event, and exceptional things occurred, and it was a learning process for me—the matches that I’ve won. This is going to sound very cocky, but I go into every match to shoot as well as I could. It wasn't about the winning and losing, that was always in the background. It was about shooting to my potential. I lost very few matches where I shot reasonably well. The 1994 competition was a match where I shot reasonably well and lost. That’s why it sticks out. But the wins that happen along the way, I’m not going to say they’re not important, because that would sound like I’m not appreciative of it, but they are what I expected. You know, if I put in the work, and I was the best shooter and I shot a good match—winning wasn’t there—it wasn’t a point of celebration. It was simply, “Okay, well, that’s what I expect to do. Let’s move on to the next one.”
The failures stand out more in my mind than the successes do. I will tell you that the greatest performance I’ve ever done shooting, I didn’t win. The performance that took the greatest amount of effort was to make the President’s 100 at the National Matches in Service Pistol. I worked harder for that than I ever did for any national or world title. It’s because I’m not very good at that, and due to that fact, the drive to work at it was harder than it might have been for other things. This doesn’t sound like much until you realize you’re making the President’s 100 and you’re not even good in the discipline. My shooting skills for bullseye are less than good. Making the President’s 100, it took me a few years to do it.
I think it was at the 2012 Bianchi Cup where I shot the best score I’d ever shot there. I was shooting Production. I did it in the match and did it two days in a row, due to the format. When I shot a 2219-12X in standing with a Production gun in the qualifier round, and then backed it up the next day with a 1908, people don’t understand how hard that was to do for me. That was an exceptional performance. You know why was I shooting standing? Because I can’t go prone and my neck doesn’t bend anymore. So, I had to shoot standing. I was doing it the hard way. Those two things there are the standout performances of my career.
Making the President’s 100 is a big deal. People that don’t shoot bullseye, they don’t do it because it’s too far out of their wheelhouse. And trust me, Bullseye is way out of my wheelhouse. But making the President’s 100 and the memory when Jim Henderson pulled the 100 patch off his uniform and gave me his patch. Those are go-to-the-grave memories for me. Someone once asked me what it was like to win the 1983 World Championships. I said, “Oh, I remember shooting in the match, but I don’t remember the stages.” I know I won—I won lots of those—but I only made the President’s 100 once.
JP: I had a question on my list about Bullseye shooting. You’ve already answered some of it, but what are your thoughts about Bullseye shooting as a sport?
RL: I love Bullseye shooting. I think unfortunately, the way competition has developed, we tend to look for something that’s easy to do. If you look how IPSC shooting was in the beginning, it was dramatically more physical than it is now, and it was far more accuracy oriented. The sport has evolved into something that is basically speed-oriented now. When you go to a match and you shoot slow, you still hit all the targets, right? So, I go to an IPSC match, and if you don’t worry about where your position is and just worry about how your shooting performance is, and you go through the course of fire and you shoot 50% slower than Nils Jonnason, you still hit all the targets, and you still walk away thinking your shooting was okay. If you go to a Bullseye match or the Bianchi Cup and there’s a fixed amount of time and you only get this long to do your thing. That is the same as a gunfight. This whole thing to slow down to be a better shooter, a better shooter in a gunfight, what if you don’t have time? Same thing happens in Bullseye. It isn’t the time, it’s the limit of time. There’s enough time to do it, but knowing I must be done in this amount of time that I don’t have, like in a rapid-fire string, you would think I’d be good at the rapid-fire string, and bad at the slow-fire string. It’s exactly the opposite, because the speed I want to shoot will not give me the accuracy I need, and I’m not a good enough shot in 10 seconds to shoot five really good shots. That’s a level of frustration for me that’s hard to describe.
I think the Bullseye component, you don’t need it to be a an IPSC Grand Master to be an all-around shooter. I think you need it do it. I think everybody needs to stop and go shoot Bullseye—everybody should try it. Because I think you should know where there are areas for you to benefit and where to gain. People don’t like it because it’s slow moving. There’s no running around, but it’s pure—just shooting. You can’t solve this problem by going fast. You can’t solve this problem with fleet footed agility. You either can shoot or you can’t, and the level of truth involved there is probably what scares people away from it is, I know a whole lot of really good shooters. I say you need to try Bullseye. Just go to the National Matches once and be part of the experience. Whether you’re standing on the line and there are 100 people on your range, and there are 100 people on the one next to you and everybody’s shooting, it’s an experience unlike anything else I’ve ever done in shooting. Then, try to perform under that environment. It may be raining, it may be windy, but it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be what it’s going to be. That’s a big statement. The purity involved in it is not found in any other shooting sport. It’s not like sporting clays. “Well, do I want to break the target here? I want to break the target here. Do I want to break the target here? What technique am I going to use?” There’s none of that in Bullseye. “Can you hold the gun in the middle? Could you pull the trigger without moving? Can you do it quick enough to make the time limit?” It's pure skill. That’s what I love about it, even though I’m not good.
JP: I’m sure you inspire a lot of people to give it a shot, you know?
RL: Well, I know I’ve inspired a lot of my friends because they’ll watch me shoot and say, “I can’t believe you’re that bad. I can kick your butt. So yes, I’ll try this.”
JP: You started out as a revolver shooter. Did that give any advantages or disadvantages?
RL: It was a huge advantage. First off, my dad did not like autoloading pistols. When I was growing up, we specifically shot Smith & Wesson double-action revolvers. That was it—we didn’t have a Python in the house. We had Smith & Wesson revolvers.
The first match I shot was in either 1977 or 1978. It was an organized match, and I shot my six-inch Model 27. I think I was third revolver. There were two autoloading shooters at the match, and I remember going home and my dad asked, “How’d it go?” It was a Saturday night match. And I said, “Well, I was fifth or sixth or something. Two guys with revolvers beat me, and then two people with autos.” And he looked at me like this was the craziest thing you’d ever seen. “How in the world did anybody beat you shooting an automatic pistol?” I said, “Well, dad, they they’re twice as fast to reload, and they’re easier to shoot fast.” And he looked at me like I had arms growing out of my head. He looked at me like it was just the craziest thing he’d ever heard. “Those guns, they’re not accurate, they’re unreliable.” I said, “That might be true, but if I want to do this anymore, I need one of those unreliable, inaccurate guns.” Being the supporter he was, he went and traded to a family friend, I think it was a Model 63 Winchester pump .22 that we had grown up with, and traded it for a 1911 National Match, which was a Gold Cup (pre-Gold Cup). That was the first .45 we had, and that's how I learned to start shooting the 1911.
With shooting the revolver, its big advantage was the operation of the trigger. You had to move your finger a long way, and you must do it quickly. Learning how to operate the trigger of a revolver made all the other guns’ triggers easy to do. Shooting seven-pound, double-action Smith & Wesson revolvers made shooting a three-pound 1911 trigger that moved 10th of an inch seem like cheating in comparison. That’s carried along my whole life—all those years of shooting revolvers means that I don't struggle with a different trigger mechanism. Whereas I know people who’ve grown up shooting 1911s, and they can only move their finger a real short distance. They’ve learned how to move a short distance, and they really struggle to shoot other guns. I believe I had that advantage, plus with a six-shot revolver, you didn’t want to do a lot of missing because reloads weren’t that quick.
JP: Good point. Was there a precise moment in your life when you realized that competition shooting was what you wanted to do for a living?
RL: That I wanted to do it? Yes, the moment when I shot that night match I described earlier. I came home from that and I was young. I was still living at home and in high school. That was in December of 1978. I came home and said, “This is all I want to do.” But I never thought of it as a business. I mean, I never thought of it as being a professional shooter. At this point, I’d been playing basketball for fun. I’d been running track for fun, and now I was going to shoot for fun to replace those in my life. That was the moment I just wanted to shoot.
When it became a business and a profession was after I started to be fairly successful. I still had a job, and I was having trouble getting the time off work or getting somebody to cover my shifts so that I could attend these matches. I took a leave of absence and started teaching to be able to make ends meet, and I was getting a little bit of support from some companies. That was the moment I said, “Okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do it. We’re either going to do this or we’re going to not. We’re going to find out in the next six months of this is going to work.” That was in 1987, and that was the moment I said, “Okay, now I’m going to push now. Now it’s going to go to a professional level.” The good news was all I wanted to do is shoot, so it’s not like I had to change my focus. All of the sudden the results mattered, because there wasn’t money coming in any other way. This had to be successful. So that’s the moment the professionalism appeared.
JP: You took the leap.
RL: Yes. It’s always a series of accidents. I never planned on being a professional shooter. That was never in the cards. I just wanted to shoot, and the only way I could shoot was to be able to not have a job. I mean, as silly as that sounds, to be able to work the way I wanted to and shoot as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t be encumbered by the daily grind of going to work. When I did that, my shooting skills and especially my well-rounded skills increased dramatically because now it wasn’t, “I’m not going to work today, I’m going to go teach or I’m going to go practice.” That was the moment where I was a good shooter and I’d won a few nationals and world shoots.
JP: You are the founding member of Team Springfield. Tell me more about your longtime partnership with Springfield Armory?
RL: My contact with them dates back into the early 1980s, when I blew up an M1A and was getting ready to go to a match. I called Springfield army up just out of the blue. I didn’t know anybody, and I hadn’t really reached a huge degree of success yet. And I called and talked to some guy named Dennis Reese, and said, “Hey, I blow up my gun. I got a match next week. I don’t know what to do.” Reese said to send it to Springfield Armory as quickly as you can and we will evaluate it, make sure it’s safe to repair or send you another one. I said, “What? Never mind. You know what? Send me yours. As soon as you can.” And they sent me a gun. That rifle, I went and shot at the Soldier of Fortune three-gun match. That was my first contact with Springfield Armory.
In 1983 I won my first national competition. Of all places, it was at Milan Rifle and Pistol Club in Illinois, which is 30 miles from where Springfield Armory was at. No connection was made there, other than the fact that I was at their home base. The prize I won for winning that match was a Supermatch M1A. The following year at the Bianchi Cup, I was shooting a 1911 made for IPSC, customized by Wilson Combat. And Springfield Armory was set up there, and knew their M1As, obviously, I had a couple at that point, and they were introducing their 1911 line. I went up and talked to the representative, which turned out to be one of the brothers, Dave Reese, who’s still a friend of mine, and said, “Hey, I’m building up a couple new guns, and I really want to use the ones I've been using. Can I get a couple guns from you to build up?” And he said, “Yes, absolutely.” I sent those guns to Bill Wilson, who said, “Man, why are you doing this? Why are you making me learn something new?” I said to Bill, “Well, because I want to use these.” He built those guns up and called me. He said, “Hey, they’re done, and they turned out pretty nice.” That was the beginning of the relationship.
Within a few years, Springfield started using the practical shooting world as an advertising tool, because they were seeing a lot of success in that. The company decided to sponsor shooters and even a whole team. When they created Team Springfield, I was already involved to a small degree. So, I was first one—they came to me and said, “Hey, listen, we’re starting this team. We want to make a big deal out of this thing, and we want you to do this.” I said, “That sounds great to me.” Then they’re paying me a little bit of money, but I’m still basically subsidizing everything with working and getting money from several places to make ends meet. Then in 1989, they said, “Listen, we want to tie you down. We want you to be part of the Springfield Armory family.” I signed what was then a 10-year contract to shoot for them. That was in 1989 so it’s sunsetted a few times, but Springfield never managed to get rid of me after that. I’ve been with Springfield Armory ever since, and that’s how the connection was made.
JP: What about providing input for gun design?
RL: That’s what I do. Now, it’s funny that everything goes full circle. I’m in this industry because I’m a good shot and that I am a gun nut, also because the money I don’t have to spend on shooting, I still spend on shooting. I still buy guns. I still go shoot. So, you know, a pure professional probably wouldn’t spend all their money on shooting. But the reality is shooting is all that I am. I’m no more than it. When I’m not shooting, I’m thinking about shooting. When I sleep, I’m dreaming about shitting. That’s really all I have ever done and ever wanted to do. It’s hard to explain, because I have family and kids that I love, but everything was second to shooting. I’d like to think that I would have been a professional shooter no matter what, but it was never a goal to be a professional shooter. I didn’t wake up and say, “I’m going to be a professional shooter.”
JP: Your mindset and your drive just kind of made it happen?
RL: Yes, it did. This was not hard for me. Understand that for somebody else, the working to do this, they might say, “I put in endless hours and I go battle and I shoot, and it wasn’t like that for me.” Well, I’m not saying it was easy, but, man, it wasn’t a battle to want to go out and shoot because it’s all I wanted to do. It’s literally all I could think of and being involved with the guns, I had my own opinions of what I wanted the gun to be. There were little details how I’d like to set my guns up, and that input is used in the development of other products. In the early days, it was more what the Custom Shop did. We had a Custom Shop, arguably the best Custom Shop in the business, producing more high quality guns than anybody else is doing. And the tool of me shooting, I would shoot match and win a match, and then we wanted to know what was in the gun. What have you done to the gun? We used that input for decades to improve the guns. And when we design a gun, it’s like, “What do you think about this? I wouldn’t do it like that. I do this and this.” In the beginning, it was making custom guns better, but it’s to the degree now that I work on practically every new gun project we have.
I’m still living the same dream. I play with guns all day long. I go home and I play with guns. Someone will ask me, “What are you doing over the weekend?” I tell them, “We’re going shooting. “Don’t you work at a gun company? What do you do all week long? I say, “I mess with guns.” “What are you doing this weekend?” “I’m going shooting.” This is my life—nothing more than this. I’m a simple person.
JP: Do you still retire your gun after winning a title?
RL: Yes. The only one I didn’t after I started that process was the one I won in 2021, the USPSA Single Stack Nationals. When I won that, I didn’t retire that gun. Well, I did retire it, but I didn’t have another gun built to replace it for whatever reason. And then I won. So, I shot that same gun the next year. I won those back-to-back titles with that same gun, and now it’s retired. But other than that, from the mid-1990s, every one of those guns that I won with got retired. I have a good collection of guns that won national championships.
JP: I bet it’s quite a sight to behold when you look in that safe.
RL: It is when people look in there, they’re like, “What is this?” Well, those two rows right there are national, meaning I either won a national or world match with those. And they say, “Why do you have so many of that gun? They all look virtually the same?” I say, “Well, because that’s the spec I like.” If you took a single-stack 1911 regardless of the caliber, 9 mm, .45, etc., they’re all very similar in that they all have kind of the same sights. They have similar trigger pulls. But no two of the custom guns ever felt exactly the same to me. There are subtle differences that average shooters might not even notice. But there are two or three guns that are particularly perfect for me if I was going to ever reproduce a gun. I’d say, “Okay, do this. The last one I won with that, that .40.” That’s probably my favorite gun. However, there are others that are very similar to somebody who didn’t know. They all look the same.
Another would say, “Well, this one looks like you've been grinding on it.” I said, “Yeah, I got that one just how I liked it.” My grinding might look like it’s ruined to somebody else, but it was the process of perfecting the gun, they’d be able to shoot it to the degree that I needed to, like the handle handlebars on a motorcycle. There isn’t a right or a wrong. In F1 racing you set a car up for Daniel Ricardo and you set one up for another driver, the cars will be completely different. The people are completely different. That’s how my pistols are. People with small hands will love my guns because I have small hands.
JP: Let’s talk about your training career. What is your favorite aspect of training?
RL: Wow, it depends. When you work with the high level military groups, their drive to work is inspiring. Those guys aren’t there because they have to be at the range today. Those guys want to be there. They’ll do anything you tell them to do. They’ll work as hard as you want to work. They’ll shoot and absorb all the detail oriented stuff. At that level, the people are the most challenging to teach because they’re already really good. So, what do you have to do to find something to improve them? On balance, they’re also the most satisfying, because they work the hardest.
A newer shooter, a less skilled shooter or a less experienced shooter, which is often the same person, doesn’t usually have that drive. They’ll all tell you, “Man, I wish I could go out and shoot all day.” I say, “Well, good for you. The next three days, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Most of those guys are enthusiastic at the beginning, but after three days of shooting all day long, everybody reaches a saturation point where there is just too much happening in their head. I mean, we address too many points. The satisfaction is different with them. If I had to tie it down to one thing—how do I explain this? There’s a certain satisfaction you get while watching somebody learn something. That light bulb moment when it’s like, “Oh man, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” They’re like, “Oh hell, I just did it.” To see that rejuvenation of their will to work.
I suppose it’s like any teacher, when they see somebody learn a thing—that’s almost the highest level of enjoyment I get from teaching. Now, there was a time that I hated it when people I taught beat me—if I drove hard to never let them beat me. Now I love it when they beat me. You know, you get that satisfaction from passing along your knowledge. It finally clicks for them. It’s so satisfying for someone to understand the concept, execute it and then all of a sudden perform and go shoot really well. I love that feeling. At this point in my life, another trophy isn’t going to change anything. But when a student comes up to me and says, “I want to tell you, the way you explain this and the things you got me to do, I didn't think it was ever possible.” That makes me can’t wait to do it again tomorrow.
If all you want to do is go out there and run drills, you’ll learn that’s not how I am when I do a class. And I don’t do very many when I do a class, I’m invested with the student. You’re here, this is going to cost you, buddy, not only money, but it’s going to cost you in effort and it’s going to cost you in concentration. This is going to be hard, but if you’re going to put in the effort, I’m going to put in the effort, and I’m going to do everything I can to tell you everything I know and teach you everything I know. I guess to some degree, that’s the same drive that makes you want to be a good shot.
During my teaching career, which has now been 30 years—maybe longer than that—I’ve learned as much from teaching as I’ve ever taught anybody. I mean, it makes you identify things. When you tell somebody, “Oh, you go out there and just shoot real good.” That doesn’t tell anybody anything. But when you have to break down the details, and create and then find the identifiers and say, “This is the thing you’re doing wrong. This is what you need to do.” It reaffirms in your brain how you’re supposed to do it. In my classes, I shoot. I shoot as much as the students shoot. I don’t like to just stand out there and tell them what to do and then walk away. I’m going to do it. Show you how to do it. If you can’t figure it out, I’m going to keep working with you. It’s a give and take thing. Classes are greatly for the instructor to learn. If the instructor is still trying to learn, and the student is just trying to learn, “I just one day want to be a better shot. That’s all I want.” Well, that’s what we all want. I just want to be a better shot.
JP: Is there one piece of knowledge that you always want your students to walk away from your classes with?
RL: Don’t try to make the thing you want to work be the thing you need to do. What that means is, I get students all the time that come in and you’ll explain a thing, and they’ll say, “Yeah, I get it.” Well, they don’t get it. They don’t understand it. What they do is transfer it to their level of understanding and then try to make that work. For instance, if we were working on a target acquisition drill and we’re shooting quick, the concept that you focus on the front sight is faulty, because you have to see far more than just the front sight. So, if I told you just focus on the front sight, it would cost you time and make you slower. Thus, I have to teach you something that’s far more difficult to do than focus on the front sight. At this point, I would teach you to not only use soft focuses, but also teach you to be able to shoot without a clear sight picture. What I mean by that is it’s not in focus. It doesn’t mean you don’t know where the guns pointed. When you break down these pieces and look at what it takes to be a great shot, it’s not what the person comes in expecting. They’re all thinking you’ve got a book of magic drills, and these magic drills are going to make you become a better shot. That’s ridiculous. Now I can create a drill that by being successful at it will indicate that you have gained some skill in that area. But shooting pistols is really about holding the gun on the target, firing it as quickly as possible and recovering back onto it. It’s a little bit aiming, a lot of trigger control, but it’s mostly gripping the gun, controlling the gun and recovering the gun. The speed version of that is, “How fast can you do it?” I wish that there was a control off the lead on a person, and I could say, “Okay, I want to just, instead of me fighting you, fighting to apply your existing knowledge,” I want to erase that right there and just imprint another thing.
I can’t remember how I said this the best, but a buddy of mine wrote it down once. Basically, you need your desire to perform to outweigh your desire for what you’re doing to be correct. That’s paraphrasing it but, but don’t come in expecting that the things you’re doing are going to get you where you want to go. It might be something else you have to do. It’s almost like developing a mindset. It is a mindset. It’s not a physical thing. I mean, yes, there are some physics involved in it. You have to be strong to control the gun, you have to have feel and you have to have vision, but none of those have to be as good as your ability to focus. A person without any discipline—I don’t care how technically gifted you may be or what your potential is for shooting—you’re never, ever going to realize what you could be. That’s hard.
I can’t tell you how many students will sit there and look at me when I tell them at the beginning of class, “Listen, I give you all the tricks right now to show you fast. First off, don’t focus on the sights. I need you to hold on tight. Never relax. Learn how to jerk the trigger and never ride the trigger as slowly as possible. Make everything fast. Okay, there you go. That’s it. Go do it.” Then they go, “Wait a minute. He told me to jerk the trigger. He told me not to focus on the sights. He told me not to relax.” Now there’s no way for a person to understand what that means until you go through the development process. So it isn’t the drill. The skill is the magic part. “Okay, so how do we develop that skill?” I’m like, “Okay, now we’re at a point where you can learn.” It takes a lot—a student can’t just come and try to be a sponge. That approach doesn’t work. You’ve got to put out. It takes a lot from a student to be able to actually learn and improve. Otherwise, I could just send you a list of drills and say, “Here, do this and you’ll be great.”
JP: It’s not like a classroom. This is real.
RL: It’s a skill-related thing, not knowledge. Knowledge alone won’t get you where you want to go.
JP: I was at Hillsdale College filming for “American Rifleman TV” last September. And your name kept coming up. Tell me about training students at the Hillsdale College Halter Shooting Center?
RL: It’s an amazing facility. My involvement came from Springfield Armory. Hillsdale contacted us, I think at SHOT Show, and our marketing department decided to support Hillsdale College with guns and other stuff. Part of the program was that I would supply some annual training where I’d go out and shoot with the with the students. The cool thing is you’re getting people on that team who are national top-five-level IPSC shooters, down to people that have never shot a gun before yesterday. Having gone there enough times over the last four years, it’s so fun for me to go in and say, “I remember when you were the new guy and you could barely hit a target, and look at you now, you’re one of the best shooters on the team.” Their drive to do it, that is a trait of Hillsdale students. This is what you expect from a Hillsdale student—that drive. It’s a special place. First off, it isn’t easy to get there, and it’s also not cheap to get there. To be there indicates a certain amount of effort that a person is willing to do. You couldn’t ask for a more diverse and rewarding group to teach. That’s the magic of the student, I guess. Any teacher, in anything, gets the same amount of satisfaction from seeing them learn.
I don’t take beginning students when I teach a normal class. I’m not a particularly patient person. I’m not politically correct, so if I don’t like what you're doing and say, “You really suck at this. Let’s go work on it,” you know that I don’t have good bedside manner. When you have a group like that, where you have people that are brand new, and some of them don’t have a lot of shooting experience but see them soak it up and put out the effort and visually, with an incredible couple days of teaching with them, you’re seeing advancement. That’s what I get out of that. I love shooting there. And you saw their facility. It’s better than the one I shoot at home all the time.
They are special kids. Here’s the funny thing. Anybody that’s a student of mine is a kid. It’s not related to age. If you’re my student, you’re one of my kids. It’s just kind of how it works, good or bad, like it or not. Hillsdale isn’t a normal college where people just normally gravitate to from out of high school. Some freshmen are 19 years old and 20 years old. You have vets that have returned from service and want to go back to school. You have 25-year-old to 30-year-old freshman students. Hillsdale is a magical place—I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a privilege to be able to go and work with that group.
JP: Did you ever have a mentor in competitive shooting?
RL: My dad. When I grew up shooting, it was different than it is now. Now it’s easy to go find people to teach you, but my dad had gave me the right amount of input and pointers to get me on track to being a good shot when I was about 13 years old. I was a really good shot, and that came directly from my father. All I did was shoot—that’s not an exaggeration. All I wanted to do is shoot. My dad was the one that instituted solid fundamental marksmanship skills.
After that, when I grew to the point where I was training all the time, there was not a mentor, but I always during my shooting career, had somebody I practiced with. In the beginning it was Brian Enos. At one point, it was Doug Koenig. Then I shot with a guy named Chad Riley a lot. There was always somebody there that was like a sounding board. It wasn’t necessarily a coach, but I learned how to teach myself how to shoot by watching other people shooting. I could watch you shoot, and I would go with you. “Am I doing that? Could I do that better?” I had to learn to do analysis, because I really didn’t have somebody that had all the answers to the questions I had, since I had to find the answers myself. It wasn't so much that there was a coach or that personality, it came from the inside. But there was always somebody there. At one point, it was my wife, Kippi. And motivation—some days, you get up and we’re like, “Oh man, I really didn’t want to go out today.” And they’re like, “Yes, you do. Get out. Get out of the house. Get out there.” There have been lots of subtle pushes through my life that made me get there. Mike Dylan was one of early ones, and my dad was obviously the earliest. Later, my own drive took over.
JP: What do you want to tell the next generation of competitive shooters that might want to emulate your success?
RL: Quit trying to be successful. Try to figure out a way to enjoy the shooting for what it is. Try to find joy in the performance. One of the questions I get is, “How can I be like you?” I tell them, “Why would you want to be like me? You’re not me. You’re not in the same situation I am.”
You know, I get so much satisfaction from shooting well that it has been the driving factor in my career. Just don’t worry about the prizes. Some people will say, “Oh, hey, I go this match because there are prizes.” Listen, if you want to make money shooting, for the average person, the best thing to do is save the money and don’t shoot. You’re going to make more money than what you might win. So don’t worry about that. You want to win a national championship, that’s a great drive, but the only way you’re going to win a national championship is by becoming the best shooter. Focus on the action of shooting. Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. It doesn’t help. Enjoy the shooting sports for what they are.
If your goal is to become a better shooter so you can defend your life and your family and your friends, make shooting the focus. If you want to be a top-level competition shooter, you better become the best shooter you are just to give yourself a chance to prove that and then be a tough competitor. Quit looking for the easy payout. Just learn to be a great shooter.
JP: Blaze your own path?
RL: Yes—you can’t do what I did. The circumstances aren’t the same. You’re not going to have the same opportunities. I’m a perfect storm. I was the right place at the right time with the right drive and the right skills. It won’t happen that way for the next and it hasn’t happened for me—don’t do what I did, just become a great shot and it takes care of itself.
JP: What are your thoughts about the NRA?
RL: My interest in guns has evolved dramatically over the decades. I was born in the 1960s, and grew up through the 1970s, a time when I never even thought about gun ownership as a right. I lived in Arizona, we went to school and there were shotguns in everybody’s car and truck racks, because we went dove hunting and then to school. We just took shooting for granted. I never thought it was a privilege. I always thought it was a right. At that point, it just was the status quo. Everybody in Mesa, Arizona, was a shooter. We all shot as I got older. I started traveling, and especially traveling out of the country and seeing places where what I was did every single day at home, they couldn’t do. I was like, “Well, what do you mean? You got a lot of money, why don’t you go buy a new gun?” “Well, I can’t have a new gun here, because the process to get a gun is this.” I’m like, “What? It’s just a gun.”
I realized as I’ve gotten older that freedom matters more to me, maybe I’ve become more responsible. I don’t know what the right word to explain it is, because I recognize that the freedoms that I have always taken for granted and currently benefiting from were fought for by the NRA. It’s always been the lobbying body that represented us. I’ve been an NRA Life Member since the early 1980s. My appreciation of what the NRA has done and continues to do—to popularize shooting and the firearms community throughout the country—is immense. All you have to do is go to any other country out of the U.S., and you will see where that culture doesn’t exist. You’ll go into a country and realize, well, they don't have an NRA, or they’re trying to have an NRA or the NRA wasn’t effective there, because most of them have an NRA, a National Firearms Association of some sort. But our NRA’s ability to maintain the fundamental rights that are in the Constitution, makes it unique in the United States. I believe the NRA is the most responsible for that to this day.
JP: So, what’s next for you? Anything new on your plate?
RL: I’m currently working in research and development. I’m sitting in an office right now at the Springfield Armory factory. I work on new projects, development of new guns, working on stuff that we need to fix and help guiding the next generation of people involved in the industry. So, I’m literally sitting here. There’s a Springfield DS prototype sitting on my desk that I’ve been sitting here looking at the whole time. There is a stack of guns over there. I’ve got a whiteboard with a whole bunch of notes written on it for something we’ll work because there are many guns here. So, it’s pretty much guns for the foreseeable future. For me, that’s what I am. Without guns, there’s nothing left.
I am enjoying this part of my life. And this focus I will bring what I once would have spent training—the same drive for product improvement and knowing about guns—it hasn’t changed. It’s just instead of the shooting, it’s six other parts. I love it. I’m a lucky person. I have lived a blessed life.
JP: Okay, that that was my last question. Is there anything else you want to add? Anything I might have missed?
RL: Take someone to the range and go shooting. People when they don’t know guns, or they’re scared of guns, they have no experience with guns, it’s because of ignorance. They’re not stupid, they’re ignorant and they don’t know what they are. I think everybody owes the gun community their rights to having firearms, that’s the cost for that—they need to take somebody shooting, ask somebody, even your friends that don’t like guns, “Do you want to shoot?” They will be like, “I don’t like guns.” This isn’t about you liking guns. You want to go shooting. And then when you do, please don’t give them the biggest, most painful thing to shoot in their hands.
For the people that are already in the shooting sports, keep shooting. Don’t slack off. Get out there and put in your regular work. We need strong membership in the shooting community, and we need to grow it. We need more of us.
Visit Rob Leatham’s website at robleatham.com.
Most Popular
