I am Bob Stone. I had the name before the Rock made it famous. Like Dwayne Johnson I am a tall individual but do not possess his natural physical abilities. I am starting this blog so the average competition shooter can have a place to seek information. As I look around the internet I often see post from professional shooters who have devoted great amounts of time and resources to making a name for themselves in the shooting sports. As an adult in my mid-40’s I have no delusions of grandeur in my shooting career. I am currently a bottom third or mid-pack shooter depending on the discipline I am shooting that day. I do enjoy getting better and hope to be a top third shooter at club matches and to hold my own at majors.
My Background
I grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City, OK. Unlike many of my family members our family did not own any firearms. My dad grew up in rural OK hunting small game in the 50’s to feed their family of 9. My mom grew up on a farm in central KS as the youngest of 5. I received a Daisy Air rifle when I was 7 or 8. That was the only “gun” I had shot until I went to Army Basic Training in 1998. When I returned home I bought a ban era Bushmaster AR and followed that with a Glock 23 a few months after 9/11. I grew up playing Midwest sports; baseball, football, basketball, and ran cross country. I played on a travel baseball team that was pretty dominant in our local area at the time and we usually did quite well on the national scene. Sports did not follow me to college after I took a year off to attend Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training for the OK National Guard. In college at Oklahoma State I met my wife of 20+ years and decided to make the Army my job out of college.
At present I am a career Army officer with more of my career behind me than in front of me. I have passed the point where the Army cares much for my desires about my career. The only decision I control at this point is when to submit my retirement packet. I am oddly okay with that since I have no idea how I will provide for my family when I decide to retire. I am an Infantry Officer which means it has been my job to orchestrate tactical violence against America’s enemies for all my adult life. Like many of my generation, I mark life events by where I was and whether I was deployed or not when an event occurred. I let you know that I am an Infantry officer to say that I have carried a rifle and pistol on my person for a large portion of my career. However, my job was never to use those weapons as my primary means to defeat America’s enemies. Rather my job was to set conditions so that the Infantrymen I led had the best chance of surviving whatever problem set we faced that day. My primary tools were my eyes, ears, and the radio. If I found myself engaging the enemy with my rifle or pistol, we were having a bad day.
I provide that context so you may understand that I attended no special training in the army outside of my normal rifle and pistol qualifications. On occasion I did qualify with a machine gun, but that is hardly useful in competitive shooting. I am not a sniper. I was never part of Special Operations. I never attended a focused Close Quarters Combat school. However, when the NCOs around me who did attend those schools talked, I listened. I picked up tidbits here and there with the wars keeping us focused on Close Quarters fighting. Afghanistan saw many engagements at distance but that was for the soldiers to fight. My job was to bring in the air and artillery to keep the enemy in place while we maneuvered.
In 2019 the Army sent me to central Texas. My family stayed behind at the previous assignment and I went to Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos) as what we call a geo-bachelor. I took my firearms with me as I went. I planned to finally get involved with the shooting sports when I arrived, I just didn’t know how. I took my DD4V7 and my Glock 17 as the start to my 3-gun kit. I also took my Mossberg 500 with plans to use that. After a ton of internet research and watching YouTube videos I bought a Stoeger M3k and used my gun belt from work. I joined a local indoor range to get more confident with a pistol and explore this LVPO I had been sold in 2017 and never really understood.
Entrance to Competitive Shooting Sports
In July of 2019 I shot my first match with Rebublic 3 Gun at the Liberty Hills range complex. I will write an additional post about getting started but let’s just say I got lucky in my squadding (which I often do) and was hooked. I was also extremely humbled. I had been carrying a rifle all of my adult career and considered myself fairly handy with a firearm. I placed 34th our of 58 shooters and probably last on my squad. But this was still something I wanted to do.
Since then I have opened my aperture quite a bit on the shooting sports. Covid hit the shooting sports hard, specifically 3 gun. Most shooters could not afford to shoot 300-500 rounds on a Saturday afternoon anymore. My family moved to Georgia in the fall of 2020 and I joined them that December. COVID continued to keep my from shooting more but as things opened up in 2022 I was able to get back into it. I shot my first PRS match in February of 2022 followed in August by my first Run and Gun and then a 3 Gun Pro-Am in September. I dipped my toes into USPSA in January of 2023 to get better at pistol shooting. I am now fully hooked.