Hemmers wrote:All the more amazing that the man is a German, from the land that brought us Anschutz, Walther, Feinwerkbau, and which heavily supports ISSF shooting and of course Biathlon.
I was at the press conference in may 2010 in Wiesbaden, when Dr. Schormann announced the change in the rules and demonstrated the new system. He mentioned, that the ISSF as also the german shooting federation DSB disagree with this approach, and he got a lot of verrry loud response from the gunwriters - but most of the journalists were from newspapers, and after the horrible Winnenden assault last year with 16 shot people the german gun law was changed again.
Technically: you choose between a laser modul to put into the system housing instead of the barrel on existing AP. It still blows out air from the tank, which cause a slightly recoil. This module for Steyr, Morini and Walther pistols will cost around 599 Euro (one of these pistols might be shon in the video, the stickers are from it's former "airpistol carreer". In the near future there will be non-shooting "Multi-Media-Pointers" (MMP), looking like an futuristic airpistol, but no gun anymore (and not rebuildable). Costs: approc 1600 Euro. The simple hit-or-miss-target will be at 200 Euro, the higher level target with 1/1000 mm resolution was mentioned to cost something around 1000 Euro each.
Therefore president Schormanns plans are not directly forced by or caused by the german gun law. He has the vision to bring Pentathlon to continents and countries, where guns of any kind, eben airpistols, are forbidden or at least under restrictions: Asia (especially indonesia, malaysia, japan), Africa ect. Those MMP's won't cause any problems regarding minor age, border control and of course (because they are no guns at all) no ammo and no accident danger. A kind of sophisticated Surefire-lamp (sad, that this brand name is not free, would fit better...)
They will have a demo in Singapur during the Youth Olympics, right in downtown Singapur, and the olympics 2012 will see Pentathlon in a park near the center of London. His next plan is to convice the biathlon union to join his plan (he has still good contacts there, both federations belonged together in the past)
But at first, that's the latest news, the time schedule is delayed because of severe technical poblems duruing the test world cup in Berlin last month. It is not easy to send a laser beam strong enough for the target to react and at the same time short enough, that even slight movements don't cause a line instead of a hitting point and a clear score. As you can imagine, the laser with the speed of light and the angle between the shooters hand and the target really make it (today!!) impossible to produce a clear hit at the high-level, scorung target (1/1000 mm precise). To hit the simple target used in most competitions, like a falling plate with only a large hit zone, that is easy - but to simulate shooting with precise "shots", that seems to be much more difficult than the inventors thought.
For more info on construction see
http://www.iq-shooting.com/index_eng.htm