TargetTalk

I was wondering if anybody out there has heard of the mad minute. You put as many shots as possible on target in a minute. Sounds like a fun way to train for rapid timed fire.

hb10mshoter wrote:I was wondering if anybody out there has heard of the mad minute. You put as many shots as possible on target in a minute. Sounds like a fun way to train for rapid timed fire.

I think it's called IPSC

Sounds like a great way to ingrain bad habits.

Steve Turner

I haven't heard of this but now that I have, I don't like it. The only speed oriented shooting I have heard of are some drills based on finals and match situations. National Coach David Johnson uses drills where you cut some of the time off of the time limit for targets in practice to add some stress to simulate match stress. He also suggests when practicing for finals to take two shots in the given 75 seconds instead of just one but this is to instill a sense of appreciation for how much time 75 seconds really is. I won't encourage anyone to use this "mad minute" thing but if they must, I hope they have fun and luck with the technique.

It was originally a British army thing; before the First Wolrd War regular soldiers were trained to shoot very rapidly at close range to create a "beaten zone".

Mad minute competitions are still held in Britain by the Lee-Enfield Rifle Association. Shooting at 200yds, the maximum permitted score is 37 rounds per minute (any more and you are considered to have cheated). From the prone position most competitors fire up to 25 shots.

I believe the record was set in the 1930s, by a musketry instructor, Sgt Snoxhall. A recent article in a British jounal suggested that he was firing from a trench off a sandbag to free his arms for quicker movement.

Tim S

Exeter

The Ft Hill Rifle and Pistol Club in Cumberland, MD has matches called Rattle Battle. You have 64 rounds and start at 300 yards prone. You are shooting at a profile. You have 1 minute per stage and can fire as many as possible. Scoring is bizarre -- 4 points at 300 yards per hit but if you have 6 or more on each of the two targets you are shooting, you can then square the lowest common number of hits (for instance, 12 and 14 hits, you get 12X4 + 14X4 + 12X12). You then march to 200 yards and repeat with sitting, kneeling, or standing but points are 3 per hit (same squaring of common hits). Ditto for 150 but you cannot use any previously used position and 2 points per hit. Finally, 100 yards and 1 point per hit.

High score was something like 464 using a M1A1 (large magazine helps). I watched one guy shoot 32 using a M1 which has an 8-shot clip -- his final score was 422 as I remember.

Joe McDaniel
Grantsville, MD

The only mad minute that I ever knew had nothing to do with competitive shooting.
I've only known it from the Army.
If you were needing to suppress a target / objective with preperatory fire, it would be called a mad minute. As in the support element would unload everything (M60 - M240B fire) it could onto the target in one minute. That way an assault unit knew that once the fire started, they had 60 seconds to begin the assault. This sometimes also included the company mortars, but timing had to be tight. More than a minute would give the target more time to 'wake up'.
Some also called the mad minute at the end of a field excersise. To get rid of excess pyrotechnics and small arms blank ammo, the whole company had one minute to shoot off everything it had. Maybe wasteful, but always a morale booster and better than a very lengthy turn-in.

http://www.geocities.com/swedishmauser1 ... oberts.htm

here is a write up of a match we did several times several years ago(funny I last edited that page 6 years ago today) with some info i had dug up at the time. (and some colorful writing)

one of the posts above refers to an M1A1 that's an Abrams Tank, an Tommy gun variant and maybe a carbine variant, could he be referring to the Springfield Armory M1A rifle?

Poole

M1A is correct (probably got too lax with things like 1903A3 and decided to add a digit). I did hear that an earlier version of this game included a machine gun so why not an even earlier version using a tank?

Joe