I had a good shooting season this year, as is usually the case. Over the Labor Day weekend, there was one that I look forward to each year specifically. I go all over the region to attend these gun-fighting competitions and meet many different people to satisfy my obsession with speed, which has been with me for a lifetime. Cowboy Fast Draw is a unique sport that is very popular, and it should get a lot more news coverage. But since it’s guns and a deliberate reverence toward a specifically American lifestyle, many woke media won’t touch it in even casual ways. But not doing so is very disingenuous to American culture, which is the point of social rejection. It would be like avoiding discussing knighthood in Europe or the samurai in Japan. Gunfighting in America is one of those core elements that almost everyone can relate to, but the forces hostile to our country want desperately to remove it from people’s minds. So we have these competitions all over the United States that are very well attended and increasing in popularity, yet many people don’t even know about them. The shooting season occurs mainly during the warm months, from April to around October. For me, the one over Labor Day in Darke County, Ohio, is usually the last, so it has a special meaning. There are a few more in October and November, but I’m often too busy to get to them. My reason for getting to as many as possible is that they are very positive experiences. I think about many things that don’t make much sense in everyday life, but all the pieces come together nicely at Fast Draw events. In the Labor Day of 2023 competition, I received a very hard-won award with significant meaning, and you can read the faces. A lot is going on with these kinds of things.
I see Fast Draw as a lot like golf; you get together with friends and see how low your score can be over some time. Gunfights usually last all day, so it’s not a one-and-done endeavor. It requires long, sustained skill that is repeatable. But unlike golf, this is a timed sport. You are forced to react as quickly as possible to the target, making this kind of competition very unusual and American. I like many things, including golf, but there are many things extraordinary about Fast Draw that I find very beneficial personally. Particularly when it comes to metaphors for speed, in regular life, where people don’t show up for gunfights with their guns on their hips and all the special equipment you get to mess around with to play the sport, there are lots of excuses for why things don’t happen or can’t. I find the typical labor position that has come out of the Department of Labor in government particularly repulsive, and since COVID was introduced to liberals, and they have used the potential for sickness not to do any work, my frustrations with the world have only increased dramatically. I do not look for excuses for anything. I think production is beautiful, but most of the world is looking for reasons, and the more liberalism in a culture, the more excuses that culture has for things that they think cannot be done. The attitude is, “If you want to do something right, you should take your time,” assumes that the faster you go at something, the worse the quality of the endeavor. In that way, the labor market that has evolved with lots of Marxism has sought to do less work and do it slower, rather than the classic American approach, which is faster and more accurate.
The reason that gunfighters in classic American Westerns were so obsessed with being faster than the other fighter is the proper metaphor for American culture, where the expectations for everything was tight. Capitalism evolved in America under the premise of speed. And, of course, the speed wasn’t of much value if accuracy wasn’t a part of the story. Of all the sports out there, Fast Draw is the fastest sport. It has elements of many popular sports, mainly drag racing. But there is nothing faster than Fast Draw, where the main objective is drawing a gun and hitting a target with a wax bullet in under half a second. And what I learn from watching different shooters from different places around the country is fascinating. And very refreshing. In the business world, slowness has been embraced because of all the socialist, communist, and under-all philosophies of Marxism running in the background, dripping wet in the compliance culture. Those who make the rules that human resource departments must follow load assumptions against the speed that a company can operate, and too often, people unthinkingly follow without pushing back against the essential premise. And it can be very frustrating to deal with, especially if you think about it, which most people avoid. In golf, you can take your time with the game and are often rewarded for going slower, so many people in business assume that slower is better and that success means making that adjustment. But from the perspective of my favorite sport, Fast Draw faster is better, and the management of speed and accuracy measures success and failure.
There are a lot of essential lessons in Fast Draw that should be directly applied to the business world, which is why I wrote a book on the subject, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. You must remove as much nonsense from the process to get the speed you need in the sport. The more motion, the more steps, and the more variables there are, the slower your time will be. And under pressure, you still must be able to hit the target. You don’t have time to be casual. Most of the winning times in the sport are around a quarter of a second to a half a second. So, the pressure to achieve speed will expose anything unnecessary. And that’s how it should be in business, whether it’s a drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant or selling a new car to a customer. You might have noticed that since COVID-19 and the Biden administration has been in the White House, things have slowed down significantly in America. The business world expects to go slower and blame the supply chain upstream for failure. This is a very un-American concept, one of the biggest problems of the modern age. And it’s very different in 2023 than in 2019 before Covid came along. Yet, without measuring things with speed and accuracy, people might not notice that the value system was slow and, ultimately, communism with low-performance expectations. The more Fast Draw events I go to, the more hope I have for the world because I can see people who know how vital speed is to modern culture. Not just dressing up in gunfighter garments and paying reverence to the Old West. I appreciate the shooters I meet and their “need for speed,” which is specifically American. And it certainly gives me hope for the future when I see how hungry people are to win at Fast Draw. Because if they can figure out that balance in that sport, they may do well in real life in ways that capitalism best reflects.
Rich Hoffman