It has been awhile since my last post. Many has happened, the most exciting thing was that I went to Cebu in September to learn 3 Gun. A few of my friends and I went to Cebu to learn from the top shooter in the Philippines. At the very beginning during the planning stage of this trip I hesitated to go to the Philippines, mostly about the safety concerns and with their government handled the HK tour bus hostage crisis back in 2010.

I weakly gave in knowing this kind of opportunity doesn’t come by often and it is my first time to play with real firearms and be trained by a top shooter.

Excitement already build up months before the trip, as my friends and I researched what gears to buy and where to buy them, as most gears selling online are in the USA and they don’t ship to overseas. Although HK have a lot of shops selling gears for airsoft but only 1 or 2 carries gears suitable for 3 Gun so supply is limited especially when it comes to quantity and styles to fit all 4 of us.

Recently there are a lot of hype about 3 Gun, even Keanu Reeves are training 3 Gun extensively for his upcoming movie John Wick 2. So, what is 3 Gun? 3 Gun is now grown into large sport in the shooting scene. It shares the same fundamentals with ipsc, ipda and other shooting sports, safety rules are pretty much the same. The only difference is, you guessed it in 3 gun the shooter will often need to use 3 types of guns in a single stage; pistol, shotgun and rifle. There are also a few divisions in 3 gun to cater for different sets of guns and attachments, but I don’t want to bore you with those rules and regulations now. What I did was I used guns that are suitable for the standard/factory division, pistol uses either iron sight or fiber optic sights, shotgun uses either iron or fiber optic sights and the rifle uses either iron or a non-magnified red dot sight. For magazine sizes pistols allow maximum of 15 rounds, rifle 30 rounds and shotgun max 8+1 rounds. There are 3 types of targets paper (for pistol and rifle), steel (for pistol and shotgun) and clay or orange steel plates (shotgun only); there is a circle in the middle of the paper targets, you have to land either 1 shot inside the circle or 2 shots on the paper targets, for steel and clay plates you just have to knock them down and it usually takes 1 shot to do so. You are running against time and there are penalties if you shoot the target with the wrong gun (7.5 seconds penalty) for each time, missing a target will add 5 seconds and the list goes on.

Here comes the fun part getting the gears, for pistol majority will use double action such as glock 17, 19 and m&p 9, for shotgun almost all uses semi-automatic shotguns and for rifles almost all uses the AR15 platform. On the belt, usually you will need 2 to 3 shotgun caddies to hold the shotgun shells for reloading, and 2 pistol magazine pouches and 1 rifle magazine pouch. I found out that with a waist size of 30 inches I quickly ran out of real estate to put all the caddies and pouches not to mention a pistol holster.

The real fun begins when we start to shoot the stages, before each stage we are allowed to do a walk through to plan how we will shoot that particular stage, plan when to use which gun and which target to shoot first and the follow through. This is also part of the fun, as everyone can have their own unique play on each stage. The planning is very important as this determines your whole play and then you go through it in your mind like what you would do when you are doing motor racing, if you don’t play properly or remember you will miss reload spots and targets or count 1 target as 2 targets, as you are running and moving between targets. There are lots to do in a stage, as you go through it you have to switch between pistol, shotgun and rifle. To my surprise the rifle is the easiest to shoot as there wasn’t much recoil due to the compensator (muzzle break), the hardest to shoot accurately is the pistol, as the some of the steel targets are quite small and also at a distance just using the iron sights are not easy to aim. The recoil on the shotgun is the strongest and will push you back so much that you can lose your footing. Reloading the shotgun is quite fun, the trainer taught us how to do dual load, which is loading 2 shells at a time, this is to save some time on reloading; since I did a bit of research before I was quad loading (loading 4 shells in one go) on day 2 and you can see me quad loading during our little mini match. There are still tons of room for improvements on my runs when you watch on my videos, but again it was my first time.

You can also watch the videos on my youtube channel, this will give you a glimpse of what 3 Gun is all about:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvhh16O91asyuZ5Wy5oNmvg

To my surprise Cebu isn’t what I had imagine, it is quite safe but it is quite backward. Most tourists were from Korea and Japan, we rarely pump into any Chinese. We didn’t explore Cebu in this trip, we pretty much go to the range and then back to the hotel, the concierge guys asked us if we are military as all we do was go to the range and back. We stayed at the Crimson Resort and Spa at Mactan, which is near the airport and to the gun range. I highly recommend this hotel as it is right at their private beach, so you can literally walk right to the beach. They have villas and normal rooms; some villas have their own private pools; also, have 2 pools one for babies another for adults. The local cuisine isn’t to our liking, so we pretty much just went to a Japanese restaurant for the 3 nights out of the 4 nights we were there. Most tourists there goes island hopping and do water sports but for us we were there only for shooting, but we also did karting on the first day. All in all, it was super fun trip and at the end of the 6 stages I was lucky enough to win our little championship and won our little bet.