13 minute read
ACTION AIR: IDPA IN TAIWAN
TAKING NAMES, GROWING NUMBERS
IF YOU CAST YOUR MIND OR EYES BACK TO AIRSOFT ACTION ISSUE NO. 120 OF DECEMBER 2020 (OR READ IT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OUR “BACK ISSUES”), YOU’LL REMEMBER STEWBACCA’S INITIAL FORAY INTO THE WORLD OF IDPA TAIWAN. NOW, AS WE START 2022, HE BRINGS THINGS UP TO DATE WITH A BANG!
Back when Ray Chang of VFC invited me along to meet with Max Chiang of local training group ‘Polar Light’ as well as many of the other VFC employees, along with live firearms users who are serving or ex-police and/or military within the ranks of Taiwan’s services, as well as an already growing number of purely civilian enthusiasts, all of whom were embarking on their own journeys within the then only recently instituted Taiwanese chapter of the IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association).
As I mentioned back in my initial article, IDPA is one of the younger disciplines among the likes of longer established IPSC competitive ‘practical’ shooting styles, although having already spent nearly two years at this point within the local Taiwan Practical Shooting Association’s Action Air / Airsoft IPSC, I might contend IDPA is perhaps more genuinely rooted in the ‘practical’ aspect while IPSC has had longer to evolve into a purely race or match style environment which is purely against the clock and your own marksmanship, while IDPA has a more real life setting to its stages with back story scenarios and more inconvenient starting conditions… being seated in a restaurant when an active shooter event occurs, for instance, and you have to draw from concealment while seated and begin engaging perpetrator targets with judicious marksmanship and immediate action planning or dealing with the closest threats first, while
still avoiding the no-shoot civilian targets.
This focus on real-world application has made the real steel equivalent a popular training platform for concealed carry users and service personnel alike in the likes of the US or other permissive environments for defensive firearms carry. In terms of Taiwan, the same core group of service personnel and hardcore firearms enthusiasts are rapidly being joined by a growing number and cross section of local civilian society. When I first met with Ray and Max at Linkou CQB for the regional qualifier a year ago they had already begun with the 100 core members required to institute their local Taiwan IDPA organisation, transfer the rules sets to make use of airsoft guns, and accumulated a further 100 or so other members at the time and were expecting to breach the 300 registered practitioner mark in the near future.
Fast forward a year, and, despite the minor COVID related lockdown which seems to have hurt Action Air’s membership as per my Fresh Prince of Action Air article in the previous issue, Taiwan IDPA have excelled in their efforts and exceeded their own expectations! Now boasting in excess of 600 practitioners, tens of locally based Safety Officers spread around the major cities of Taiwan, and are fast growing to be the largest Asian chapter.
This is excellent news all round, and alongside our various other activities here with the likes of the Taiwan Airgun and Airsoft Association (TWAAA – which I’ll be covering in more depth after their special event I attended on Christmas Day!) and various skirmishing team alliances in promoting growth of the various shooting related sports/hobbies as well as a more positive public image and general beneficial culture. Local media were also present at this year’s 2021 National Championship matches over the weekend of the 18th & 19th of December.
NO MOA, BUT OMG!
As I’m still working a long day on Saturdays in my day job and had already taken the previous weekend off for MOA 2021 (which was also unfortunately a casualty of local ongoing lockdown restrictions on indoor public events and thus didn’t go ahead) I’d been unable to take the full weekend off again and had to make my way out once again to Linkou’s Taiwan CQB Club, where the local police and SWAT teams train during the week and airsofters descend upon in the off hours, early on Sunday morning following a sunrise awakening and my usual commute out that way to where I work in the week, and a further taxi ride up to the site, and got myself involved in the bustle of the National Championships.
Over the full weekend in excess of 150 practitioners from all over Taiwan participated in a total of 12 separate stages with an array of layouts and matching scenarios, with representation by the local Taipei teams of VFC’s own shooting club, Taiwan shooter’s
union, 165 Shooters and 32D shooters as well as other teams from further south in Taichung and Kaohsiung, who were also joined by an array of services personnel and independent or media related folks such as myself and some other local YouTube content creators trying our hands at the action and helping to spread the good word locally and further afield.
I myself had the privilege and pleasure of being attached to Squad 8 which was comprised primarily of local active service Republic of China Armed forces personnel, who were of course competing in their full service gear, albeit it many of them using their own personal airsoft Glock replicas in favour of their real T75 sidearms (a locally licensed produced variant of the Beretta M92 series) as well as being joined by local YouTubers Jeff Lu (Jeff The Kid) and Syrena (akl. syrena) who are both involved in airsoft gameplay, gun reviews and online gaming crossover and training related content respectively.
We were allowed to tag along with the RoC Army gents and undertake stages 5,6 and 7 at the far end of the indoor arena’s various layouts. I ran all the stages dressed in suited and booted order, “Hitman” style red tie and all (and my hairline now moving towards Die Hard 4.0 or otherwise matching agent 47’s!) with my VFC Walther PPQ NPA pistol in my genuine Safariland 579 adjustable universal holster as well as spare magazines on the other side of my belt, all conveniently concealed by my suit jacket as per civilian class shooter regulations.
I was also allowed to dabble with my WETech MP5A5 on stages 6 and 7 as we had some time left over while the Army gents were cycling through the other stages following our initial run-throughs of them for the cameras and our own footage and experience. Sufficed to say I had a whale of a time shooting in formal wear with a replica of the local police agency’s sidearm. I also managed to do fairly well in terms of marksmanship, albeit with some early procedural issues on the first stage given my sudden transfer out of my usual IPSC environment. Stage 5 comprised of a seated start, with your hands cuffed together, and your pistol loaded in condition one and your spare magazines along with it, all concealed in a folding pistol bag on the table in front of you. In an interrogation breakout style scenario, the shooter had to retrieve their sidearm, shoot two targets right in front of the table flanking a no shoot, then engage three targets on each side of them at increasing ranges, again minding the two no shoots in among them, one on each side in the middle ranks. I picked up a procedural error here for engaging the furthest left target before engaging the midrange one, I was unaware of the rule beforehand but that was a rapid learning experience, and I did reasonably well with only one miss on the far-right target and some opening up of shots at distance. Not terrible, I felt, given that I’ve barely fielded my PPQ NPA since getting it and trying it once at IPSC stage practise; the trigger is much longer and four times the pull weight of my usual Shadow 2, and the magazine release is far less intuitive as it is a twin narrow paddle release, nonetheless I soon got back into the hang of accurate controlled shots with
quick follow ups on the paper targets, and on stages 6 and 7 I shot them entirely clean with the pistol and got some more thumb pad sized pairs on some of the targets, and even managed to pull a bit of a ‘Collateral’ Mozambique drill on the first target of stage 7, drilling two almost dead centre chest and one square in the centre of the head having to draw from concealment and fire from the hip before bringing my Walther up to properly sight in and move on to the next target.
I was really happy with my pistol performance on all the stages despite some other procedural errors where my clown shoes strayed over fault lines taped out on the floor to demarcate cover positions, something I will have to get used to in terms of considering my footwork; in IPSC we use raised fault lines which give a tactile register with your shoes, or outright trip you up, however we never have to consider return fire and maintaining appropriate cover, something I very much like the idea of in IDPA.
With the MP5A5 I ran stages 6 and 7 with it (I did witness one of the 32D shooter club guys run his MP5SD5 in the handcuffed stage 5 fairy effectively but it seemed a lot more cumbersome than I was willing to dabble with at the time!) and again I did reasonably well although the last round dead trigger function didn’t work perfectly each time so I had a few dry fires that I had to reload and make up for, then I realised I’d drilled through one target and tagged the no shoot in the distance behind it as the
rounds continued on; it was easier to lean out of alignment with a pistol on the first run to avoid that, again, something to consider, the height over bore issue of the sights on the MP5 at such short ranges also placed my shots lower than I would have liked, again, something to think about longer term. My MP5 run on stage 7 was much slicker, unfortunately my GoPro didn’t capture it so you’ll have to take my word for it; sad times, I always miss the best video opportunities!
CELEBRATION AND EXHAUSTION!
With all my own dabbling in the shooting done I hung around while the remainder of Squad 8 and the guys from the RoC Army and 32D shooters team finished up their run-throughs of the stages and took plenty of photos and videos of them to add to my event collection. Following this Ray escorted me back out of the firing arena to the safe area and I settled in to a much appreciated coffee and started having an in depth discussion with Jeff regarding firearms laws and policies of the UK versus Taiwan and our experiences of both.
Lunchtime soon rolled around and we all broke for a very nicely put together buffet followed by the breakdown of all the stage equipment, team photos and eventually all the awards ceremonies on the stage erected at the side of what is usually the main safezone area, with a much more extensive array of different classes than I’m used to seeing; IPSC is limited to the basic Production, Standard and Open divisions due to the smaller scale of our membership, so there aren’t even sub-divisions for optics within each division as such, and while we also engage in occasional TSMOC operated rifle competitions we rarely mix the two in one event.
The IDPA Taiwan National Championship comprised of myriad different shooting divisions, with not just pistol and even revolver use, but Pistol Calibre Carbine with PCC’s like my MP5 and others being used, as well as different sub-divisions for ladies, juniors/ high school, service personnel and other such sub-categories. This meant the awards ceremony was somewhat more involved, and coupled with the raffle that broke up the time between each round of awards, a lot of happy faces went away clutching medals as well as many shiny new toys that were being given away – one lucky winner landed a VFC
BCM MCMR GBBR, and Patty of team Spring Rain / 165 Shooters walked away with an MP5k PDW which she seemed duly ecstatic about.
Clarence Lai and Katherine also turned up during lunchtime so I had some time to chat once again with them and acquire the latest raft of CLPD replacement components for my KJW Shadow 2 while some others were gifted his latest revolver or Hi Capa components to test out as well, and they were talking at length with many of the seasoned shooters who are long lost friends or new acquaintances. VFC similarly had a stall extolling their latest wares throughout the day which got some sales traffic in the form of people picking up the latest licensed Glock pistols, as well as eyeing up the more recent IDPA branded M1911 and the much awaited Mk48 Maximi LMG AEG, and even the Carl Gustav shower shell launcher unit which appears to now be a joint venture between PengHu Arms Factory and VFC.
With a long and somewhat exhausting day for myself and many others finally tied off, I said my goodbyes and headed back homeward bound to deal with the inevitable sugar and caffeine crash that these events usually entail; good footwear is always advisable for being on your feet all day, my Lowa Zephyrs are an excellent choice, so I might have to share my thoughts on those in greater detail.
Once again I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to Ray and Max as well as Sam who was an excellent Range Officer for our group and the wider SO team with IDPA Taiwan, and congratulate all the competitors and organisers for a stellar performance under what are still difficult conditions to deal with lately. I may even have to check out VFC’s newly opened IDPA shooting club during some of my nonIPSC training nights after work.
Eat, Shoot, Sleep, Repeat! AA
