Vantage Point North

SRA competitor with a tst-class equipment (Photo by: Heli Soini) I’ve been shooting the Practical Shooting aka. IPSC for the past 15 years and unlike most of my peers, I haven’t competed in its Finnish cousin SRA or Sovellettu Reservilaisammunta, that is roughly translated as Applied Reservist Shooting. This weekend I finally managed to schedule the mandatory safety course for the SRA. But what actually is the SRA? To understand the sport, we have to first take a short hike across the Atlantic in to the USA, where Practical Shooting was formed. It’s, as the name implies, a shooting sport that focuses on the practical and efficient use of modern self-defense and law enforcement style firearms. The competitions consist of a number of stages that pit the shooter against a scenario with multiple targets. T he stage is timed with a shot timer and the targets are scored. The final result is a hit factor that is calculated by dividing the score with the time used. While t...

By the beginning of the March 1940 the Finnish leadership knew that the end was near. Both frontline troops and logistics were on the brink of a collapse. Standing alone against the Soviet giant was impossible without reinforcements and supplies from abroad. The massed assaults by tanks and infantry were preceded by artillery barrages on the scale of the WW1 western front that simply turned all defensive positions into gravel. A memorial service that was held on May 1940 for the 26 000 fallen Finns   The Soviet demands for a peace treaty were staggering. Finland was expected to hand over the homes of 400 000 of its citizens, including the second largest city Viipuri. The new border would also be much more difficult to defend in the future and the USSR would get a naval base in Hanko at the South Western coast. The western allies kept promising help through Norway and Sweden, but both nations refused to allow troops to transit. While Finland used the Western sup...