One of the top competitive shooters in the world now calls Radford home. Kevin Angstadt has been among the best for over 10 years.
He has won over 75 NRA Action Pistol matches since 2001 and has been in the top 20 nationally since 2004. He grew up in Wytheville shooting at cans with a double-nine .22 revolver, but didn’t start shooting competitively until he was 35 years old.
Angstadt shot his first World match as a member of the United States national team in 2006 in Australia and has qualified every year since.
The sport is called NRA Action Pistol, which combines accuracy with speed. A match consists of four events, which are normally 48 rounds each.
The events include:
Practical: strings of fire are fired at 10, 15, 25 and 50 yards including a weak hand only string at 10 yards.
Barricade: strings of fire are fired at 10, 15, 25 and 35 yards. Each string is fired from behind a barricade.
Moving target: strings of fire are fired at 10, 15, 20 and 25 yards. The target moves at 10ft a second for 60 feet.
Falling Plate: strings of fired at 10, 15, 20 and 25 yards. Targets are 8″ round steel plates.
All strings of fire are shot under certain time limits. As an example, the first 10 yard string on the Practical is one shot on each of two targets in three seconds. Start position is hands held shoulder high with the gun in a holster.
The gun is not your typical one that you could buy at your local sporting goods shop. Angstadt’s guns are custom-built by Bob Howard in Knoxville Tennessee.
Over the years, he has used a nine-pound recoil spring that has increased reliability with the high light loads he uses in competition.
The gun is similar to a .38 but heavily modified for this type of competition.
In November, Angstadt won the New Zealand Cup.
There are many shooting opportunities in the Olympics, but according to Angstadt, his sport is not one of those.
In his every-day job, Angstadt is as an electronics technician that maintains his own air miles working on weather observation systems at airports around the country.
His long term goals are to maintain a high level of competitiveness and to win a World Championship.
“I plan to shoot matches as long as I’m physically able. I have friends that shoot this sport well into their 70’s,” he said.
Angstadt success has also given him the opportunity to promote the sport and what he hopes will grow it. He recently introduced his wife, Lynn, to it. So who knows, there might be another Angstadt shooting their way through the competition in the next few years.
