by Hap Rocketto
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall combined to touch off a chain of events that threatened to change the face of American Conventional Prone Shooting forever. Why events in Europe and Asia would effect the lives of such venerable Black Hawks as Marianne Driver and Earl Price during Camp Perry ’93 is a story of such Byzantine complexity that only the bare bones can be covered in this short article.
However, it all started behind the thick stone wall of Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison, headquarters of the Soviet Secret Police: the infamous KGB. A small cadre of high placed KGB agents realized that they soon would be out of work and at the mercy of the citizens of the newly democratic nation. They were well aware that the past outrages committed in the name of the former Soviet state would not go unpunished. Employing the wiles developed over decades of doing Communist Party dirty work they silently disappeared into the swirling snows on Red Square only to emerge months later, thousands of miles away, with new identities and pockets stuffed with the contents of numbered Swiss bank accounts.
Meanwhile thousands of skilled Soviet and Eastern European craftsmen found themselves on the unemployment line as the government subsidized defense industry folded. The emerging capitalists brainstormed to find ideas that would enable them to convert from socialism. They knew that they had to develop a product that they could sell to the west for hard currency. It had to be high quality and scarce in the west. Who demanded quality goods and had enough ready cash to burn a wet elephant? American smallbore shooters fit this description perfectly and soon shiploads of high quality .22 match ammunition were on its way to the Port of Toledo where it was trucked to Port Clinton. Packed in little plastic trays like sardines and sealed up in tins like canned hams the Russian “knot lot” was soon piled high on the loading docks of the merchants on Commercial Row. The bank accounts of the Russian ammunition czars grew plump while the wallets of American shooters shrunk as the belly shooters cached away crate after crate of the tack driving 22s.
East German tool and die makers continued to manufacture precision measuring instruments, or sold defense secrets, to keep black bread and borscht on the table. Contact between the Soviet masters and their East German puppets were soon reestablished and a devious plan emerged. Armed with the knowledge that the Americans were gobbling up Russian .22 match ammunition on the shores of Lake Erie the ghost like former KGB agents bought NRA Conventional Smallbore Rule Books and gathered up the precision measuring instruments made by their former slaves. Descending upon Port Clinton with enforcement “skills” unknown to freedom loving Americans these law and order chameleons kidnapped God-fearing NRA volunteers, donned their striped shirts or orange vests and became the dreaded Angle Police.
These imposters interpreted NRA Rule 5.6 in the most Draconian manner. They wielded “measurement devices” that would not have seemed out of place in the cells of Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition. They interrupted shooters during practice, during prep periods, and during the matches. Shooters who had been firing at Camp Perry through the administrations of ten presidents were treated as if they were common criminals. The competitors rose up like the descendants of the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington that they are and packed the ad hoc Smallbore Rifle Committee Meeting to voice outrage at the cavalier treatment to which he elders of the sport had been subjected.
Since that meeting the Angle Police have been exposed for what they are and our God fearing NRA volunteers have been released from the dank cellars at Mon Ami’s in which they were held. Now Truth, Justice, and the American Way, in the form of a reasonable interpretation of Rule 5.6, will again prevail at Camp Perry.
