For purely selfish reasons, I have spent much more time shooting in Fast Draw competitions during the summer of 2022. I’ve always done competitions like this, but this year I went to all the Ohio Fast Draw events and traveled a lot more than usual to competitive events giving myself a much-needed vacation. The question that has come at me is why I was running myself ragged with all the events. There are a lot of easier things to do in life than competing with guns in stressful and very fast matches where things are measured in such small increments. Shooting and hitting a target in under half a second, or at nearly a quarter of a second as I typically do, isn’t what many people consider relaxing. But believe me, in my life, it is. That kind of speed and free flow of pure energy is a real benefit in ways that are hard to explain, which I’ve tried when people have asked, scratching their heads. But after a weekend shoot over Labor Day where I could shoot competitively with some really great shooters and the event was fast and very competent, I found myself grateful for the experience and the summation of all the other summer shoots. I was taking some of my own advice from my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, and I’m very glad I did. Fast Draw is the fastest sport in the world, and when you have to deal with many hundreds of people per week, sometimes thousands, the chance to stand in front of a target and just let everything rip forth is wonderful.
The truth is that people are slow; they spend much of their lives looking for reasons not to do things, so when you find yourself dealing with many people, all who are doing their best to do very little, it can be very frustrating. And the world, after Covid, as a result of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset and the intrusive actions of Bill Gates, making the governments of the world dance by the strings they control like wood-carved marionettes, has only become slower. Bureaucrats have one purpose in life: to make things go slower. Everyone in the world these days seems fully committed to going as slow as they can and to lobby for things to be slower and slower. You can see the difference in a typical drive-thru window; things have slowed down at McDonald’s and Wendy’s fast food restaurants due to a post-Covid world. The government has told employees they can take off all they want and still get paid. Doctors have become everyone’s parents and intercede when those mean old employers expect work performance for the pay they issue. It has become a real mess of incompetence that is the net result of the Biden administration’s attitude toward work, labor, and globalism, which has sucked the air out of the ambition of American effort in truly disgusting ways. And I have been getting angrier and angrier the more I deal with people causing me several times during the year of 2022 to consider just packing everything up, telling everyone to go to hell, and going to a mountaintop with all my books and saying, “peace out.”
I live a very fast life; I always have. I love speed because the quicker you can do things, the more you get to do in life. So it is hard for me to slow down long enough to go to see medical people because time is always scheduled to their convenience, not yours. I hate going to the BMV for that very reason. It’s such a slow process. I have even been very frustrated with one of my favorite things, going to Kings Island on Friday nights after a busy professional week, because things have really slowed down there as well. My wife and I like to ride roller coasters to blow off steam. I get time to think about things while we wait in line, and of course, roller coasters are nice and fast. But the employees have been horrible this year, worse than at any other time in my life; they are slow, dim-witted, almost representatives of a zombie apocalypse. I don’t think that the people changed, but we lost IQ points during Covid, and the government has crippled young people into thinking in a lazy fashion that makes them barely functional. So even going to Kings Island to relax on roller coasters has not been as fulfilling as it normally is. I’ve never liked the European attitude toward work, which you can clearly see anytime you go to London, Paris, or the Netherlands; they don’t like the American expectation to have everything fast; they like to take their time and smell the roses as they say. But I find all that slowness disgusting. And with Covid and the Biden administration, those types of slow people have been empowered, and the more you deal with people, the more of that attitude you tend to interact with. And for me, it has been real torture.
So that brings us back to Cowboy Fast Draw and competitive events. All the people in that sport get it. They understand the need for speed and the beauty of unleashing energy and flowing toward an objective as quickly as possible. And spending more time with those kinds of people has been truly wonderful. I can’t say that I will always be able to shoot in those competitive events as much as I did this year. What I did was probably excessive, but it benefited me wonderfully. But, I have been gone a lot. I am one who does not do well in traffic jams. I don’t like to get stuck under any conditions waiting for much of anything. When I get out of a traffic jam and back into the country where roads are wide open, I like to drive as fast as I can without people in my way to slow me down. And that’s how I am with most people. I like to pack a lifetime into a typical day, so when you end up dealing with people who would rather be asleep and multiply that by 100 or 200 people, it can be very frustrating. But I healed much of that this summer and accomplished many of my personal goals for shooting. I won a lot of events which made me happy. It was consistent even under great duress at times, so I learned a lot of good things in doing these events. But the ability to remove all the noise from my life and just let loose all the speed I can muster on something with intense focus has been wonderful. It has restored me some patience in dealing with a much slower world that needs motivation to go faster and be more competent. That is, after all, one of my core values to others, and when I get to the point where I don’t want to do it anymore, a lot of people end up suffering. So the Fast Draw events have been significant; I have been doing them almost every weekend and traveled to many places to participate in them with many like-minded people. And I can’t recommend Fast Draw as a sport enough, for all the reasons stated and more. Speed is great. Slowness is for the lazy.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 