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COWTOWN, ARIZONA THE CRADLE OF COWBOY ACTION SHOOTING BY ALAN GARBERS

The original Cowtown had some whimsical stages including a gallows and a two-story hotel. Photo: “Deadeye Al”

Cowtown! The name itself makes a person want to don a pair of spurs and a 10-gallon hat! Just about everyone involved in cowboy-action shooting has heard of Cowtown. In fact, it is one of the cradles of the sport and continues to generate countless champions. So how did Cowtown start? Well, pull up a chair to the mesquite-wood fire and listen …

The Fire & Ice match at Cowtown is very popular and always
draws shooters from around the world. Photo: Alan “Cholla” Garbers

History

In the 1970s, Hollywood stuntman Ron Nix started building an 1880s movie set north of Peoria, Ariz.

Cowtown was born as the saguaro-studded hills and canyons made the perfect location for filming. The town was also a school to teach the craft of being stuntmen (or women). Historians say over 200 movies and television episodes were shot at Cowtown, including the classic Billy Jack films, the little-known film Knight Rider 2010 and Dead Man, an “acid” western starring Johnny Depp. There were even rodeo and rappelling events.

The location was the perfect backdrop for Civil War reenactments and provided an Old West experience for tourists, complete with staged shootouts and gun-

handling demonstrations. Nationally known fast-draw artists Bill Waller and Jim Martin frequently put on fast-draw shows in front of Cowtown audiences.

Waller, Martin and a group of friends were also enjoying frequent informal competition shooting “cowboy” guns in staged scenarios in the open desert not far from the small town of Cave Creek. As the group grew, they realized they needed to organize and become a proper club. In 1982, the Arizona Cowboy Shooters Association was born.

With the growing local excitement of cowboy-action shooting, it wasn’t long before Cowtown owner Ron Nix became aware of the Arizona Cowboy Shooters Association. It seemed like a perfect match to invite the group to compete at Cowtown.

An area was cleared in a canyon below the movie set for a shooting range. It was simple at first but kept growing. False-fronted buildings were erected and Nix donated other items to complete the ambiance. When the match was over, the shooters could celebrate their successes or drown their sorrows in the active saloon and restaurant in the movie set.

Along the way, there were a few growing pains and a new name was chosen — the Cowtown Cowboy Shooters Association.

The flooding in 2014 twisted and broke the buildings as well
as buried targets, tables, and props under many feet of debris.
Some were washed away. Photo: “Hells Comin”

The gates of Cowtown still commemorate shooter and caretaker Don Snow. Photo: Alan “Cholla” Garbers

Joining Forces

Lady Luck also played a hand in Cowtown. A group of shooters from California was looking to organize a cowboy-action shooters club in which people around the country and even the world could participate.

The two groups compared notes and decided to work together for mutual benefit. The Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) was born. The first sanctioned SASS match was held at Cowtown in September 1987. In a trend that continues today, many Cowtown shooters — including the top female shooter Gail Snow, aka Barbwire — dominated the top positions.

Gail and her husband, Don, became caretakers of the range. They made sure it was done if something needed doing, from setting up targets to writing stages. Through their hard work, Cowtown Shooters continued to grow.

The sport of cowboy action shooting kept growing and Cowtown became the location for the Arizona State Championships. Other big matches blossomed in the Sonoran Desert but things weren’t always coming up poppies and saguaro blossoms for Cowtown.

he author tries to live up to his alias “Cholla” at Cowtown.
Photo: Dianna Garbers

Tragedy and Triumph

In the late 1990s, a fire swept through some of the buildings. The City of Peoria had recently incorporated the area and condemned the remaining movie set buildings as they had not been built to code. Gone were the shops, the restaurant, the saloon and wide-eyed tourists. From the remains, a wooden cowboy — forever caught in agony — was pulled down to the range to remember what had once been.

In 2000, tragedy struck the Cowtown Shooter family. Don Snow passed away after a prolonged illness and the range had lost a guiding light. In memorial the cowboy range was rededicated as Fort Snow.

In 2014 torrential rains sent a flash flood raging down the canyons of central Arizona. The deluge engulfed the Cowtown range and decimated the mock buildings comprising the stages. Ironically, a church brought down from Nevada was the only building still standing.

Once the shock of the devastation wore off, SASS clubs from around the state and beyond pitched in to clear the rubble. Alums from around the world sent their support. Buildings used in the SASS Winter Range match were donated to Cowtown. Gail and the Swiss Kid worked to design new stages and a better flow pattern for the big games. Pulling together, Cowtown Alumni rebuilt the setting into what is seen today.

The cowboy-action range wasn’t the only thing changing. Under new ownership, Cowtown branched out. Now, hardly a day or night goes by when there isn’t some competition or training. From long-range matches to USPSA events, from steel matches to multi-gun matches, they even host John Wick-inspired Excommunicado events.

The gates of Fort Snow have seen shooters come and shooters go, but the camaraderie — and passion — for fun and excellence remain the same. While Cowtown has expanded to become one of the premier multipurpose ranges in the Southwest, it will always be remembered as the cradle of cowboy action shooting.

MG42? Yeah, we’ve got an MG42. Experience the “Buzzsaw”!

Some Red Hot Gospel there!

By Will Dabbs MD

Imagining a New World Without the NFA — It’s easy to get carried away with home defense weapons these days. I’m obviously kidding. It is physically impossible to get carried away with home defense guns. (Photo provided by author.)

Congress passed the National Firearms Act of 1934 in response to the scourge of the motorized bandit. Dillinger, Barrow, Van Meter, Capone, and others both captivated and terrified the American public. In the face of the media-fueled canard of hypothetical machinegun-toting criminals lurking behind every bush, legislators decided that something simply had to be done.

That something leveraged the taxation powers of the US Congress to effectively end commerce in machineguns, sound suppressors, short-barreled long guns, and destructive devices like cannons and hand grenades.

There is some curious cognitive dissonance at work here. The astute observer will note that the 1st and 2d Amendments to the US Constitution are next door neighbors. The 1st Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The courts have interpreted the 1st Amendment to protect, among many other things, pornography in most of its many-splendored Information Age forms. Leave the kids out of it and use consenting adults and images depicting rape, assault, and violent dismemberment distributed via the world’s most advanced digital media are all constitutionally armored up against puritanical molestation.

By contrast, there are places where an American citizen’s constitutional right to own a firearm is restricted into irrelevancy. If we applied the same filters to the 1st Amendment that we do to the 2d, the only speech that would be truly protected would be whatever you might be able to conjure up using an 18th-century steam-driven printing press.

For the sake of discussion, let us ponder a different world—a world that is truly free and unfettered as the Founders clearly intended. Let’s imagine a scenario wherein you don’t need some kind of government writ to drive a car, build a shed, buy a gun, or cut somebody’s hair.

Let’s visualize a hypothetical America without the recognized fifty-four volumes of US Code with its more than 300,000 individual federal laws. In short, let’s fancy firearms without the artificial restrictions imposed by the NFA. What would the ideal home defense gun look like if there truly were no rules?

The Mission

Ar15 and Pistol — This represents the current state of the art in home defense tools in Information Age America. This AR15 pistol and Springfield Armory Echelon are about as good as it gets within the confines of American firearms law. (Photo provided by author.)

There are 148 million total housing units in the United States. There are roughly one million reported home invasions each annum. That means there is a 1-in-148 statistical chance that your home will be violated in any given year.

The current life expectancy for an American male is 78.4 years. Women live longer than men for obvious reasons. Their life expectancy is a bit north of 81 years.

Statistically speaking, half of all Americans will experience a home invasion over the course of the lifetimes. Some neighborhoods are obviously worse than others, but those are the numbers.

As such, home defense guns are not just marketing hype. Precious few among us can afford a 24/7 live-in cop. How on earth would you keep him in doughnuts? As a result, free folk assume responsibility for our own security. That means a proper home defense arm.

Unlike carry guns, this hypothetical weapon need not be concealable. Weight is a consideration, but not a big one. You won’t be humping this thing on a 15-mile ruck march. It just needs to be sufficiently maneuverable to move easily within the home. So, let’s get started.

Cartridge and Caliber

Caliber selection is not as straightforward as you might think. While there are hundreds if not thousands of options ranging from .22 rimfire up through .50 BMG, caliber selection for the ideal home defense weapon really distills down to either 9mm Para or 5.56mm with a few die hard .45ACP acolytes sprinkled over the top for flavor. The performance of these cartridges in a home defense scenario is a bit counterintuitive.

The concern is typically overpenetration. The reason so few folks opt for the .50BMG round as a home defense tool is that John Browning’s massive counter-balloon cartridge will penetrate end-to-end through most shopping malls. When precious people might be hiding behind a few flimsy sheets of drywall, overpenetration becomes a concern. To a degree, modern technology actually makes that worse.

Most modern high-tech pistol-caliber social bullets spawn from research driven by Law Enforcement. The ideal cop bullet expands reliably but is barrier blind. This means that these souped-up bonded projectiles remain intact when passing through such stuff as clothing, glass, or wall board. That can result in excessive penetration for the responsible home defender.

The downside is muzzle blast and noise. Rifle rounds of any sort, particularly when fired out of short barrels, will reliably produce an earth-shaking report while lighting up the night. These are all simply data points in our decision tree. However, I’d still opt for 9mm myself and just maintain my situational awareness.

Barrel Length and Buttstocks

We’ll start with a long gun, because pistols are horrible. Most of us carry them regularly, but a traditional handgun is the toughest of all common firearms to run safely and well. It is innately imprecise in the hands of anyone but a trained professional. We use handguns because rifles are tough to hide underneath shorts and a t-shirt. For home defense purposes, we will start with something that has a decent buttstock.

The original text of the 1934 NFA purportedly included handguns for that onerous $200 tax. Realizing that enterprising Americans would simply cut down their long guns if handguns were banned, the barrel length restrictions were codified in the law.

Handguns were dropped to get the vile thing passed, and nobody thought to get rid of the barrel length dicta. That’s why you can walk out of your local gun emporium with a pocket pistol cash and carry, but cutting the barrel down on grandad’s single-barrel 12-bore to 17 inches can get you ten years in the Big House. If none of that existed, home defense guns would all have short barrels.

How short that barrel gets is always a compromise. The shorter the tube, the slower the bullet and the more egregious the muzzle flash. Longer barrels are more accurate and hard-hitting but tougher in tight corners. Ideally, I’d say eight to ten inches for a pistol-caliber gun is a good compromise.

Sound Suppressors

Of course the ideal home defense arm will have a sound suppressor. It is asinine that we encumber suppressors with so much artificial legislative baggage. You can buy rimfire cans without any ancillary registration in France, of all places. That’s just embarrassing.

Sound suppressors on a gun that is intended to be used indoors are simply intuitive. Nothing about a sound-suppressed tactical firearm is truly silent, but the inclusion of a quality suppressor makes it easier to communicate. The diminution of muzzle flash also enhances both accuracy and control.

Suppressors can be either integral or removable. Removeable cans are just that. Integral suppressors in a 9mm platform often incorporate ported barrels that drop standard supersonic rounds into the subsonic range. In the world of sound-suppressed pistol-caliber firearms, this is as good as it gets.

Giggle Switches

Three position safety — In the absence of any serious rules, all proper defensive long guns should be selective fire. (Photo provided by author.)

All serious close combat weapons should have selective fire capability. A four-position selector offering a three-round burst option is even better. That having been said, while the option should be there, serious gunmen almost never use it.

The 22d SAS operators who cleared Princes Gate in London in 1980 purportedly terminated most of those Iranian terrorists with a full auto mag dump apiece from their MP5’s. That means not having to say you’re sorry in any of the world’s recognized languages. However, not many of us can run a gun quite so well as might your typical SAS operator.

Serious professionals nowadays train to put semiauto double taps onto their targets in an expeditious fashion. So long as Level III body armor is not in play, this will reliably do the deed. However, retaining the full auto option, especially in a placid pistol-caliber gun, is a no-brainer.

It is Alive!

UMP and MP5SD — The ideal home defense gun would be the arithmetic mean between the HK MP5SD (top) and the HK UMP. (Photo provided by author.)

So, what does that hypothetical ideal home defense weapon actually look like? I would propose that it doesn’t actually exist. In my experience, the HK MP5SD is the most controllable, most precise CQB tool on Planet Earth. However, HK launched the MP5SD in 1974. The gun is overly complicated, it’s old, and it doesn’t readily lend itself to optics or accessories.

The HK UMP launched in 1999. If you haven’t had the pleasure, the UMP (Universal Machine Pistol) is the Glock of submachine guns. It sports a polymer chassis and weighs about five pounds. The UMP is readily configurable between 9mm, .40S&W, and .45ACP while offering a sedate rate of fire and superlative ergonomics. However, it is not integrally suppressed. The UMP will take a can, but only the detachable muzzle sort.

Author with UMP — The HK UMP is a fine defensive weapon as-is. However, it could be tweaked just a little bit better. (Photo provided by author.)

So, in a world without rules, I would approach our buddies at Oberndorf and ask them to build me an integrally-suppressed UMP in 9mm with a ported barrel that rendered standard 9mm rounds subsonic. I’d outfit that hypothetical gun with a combination white tactical light/green laser and a top-flight red dot or Holosight.

I’d secure it against little fingers and stage the gun alongside a couple of spare magazines where I could get to it quickly. Then I’d sleep well knowing that my castle was defended by the finest home defense weapon mankind could contrive.