Email from Colorado gunsmith Karl Lippard, maker of the Combat NCO 1911:

FYI. The repeat of the 600 yard shooting [held July 21st without our knowledge]  was by request to video for record. There was no practice or preparation. The next one is scheduled shoot for airing on the Outdoor Channel January. Target: regulation MR 1 rifle 600 yard target. Location: Whittington Center, Raton, NM. I will sight in my pistol this time. Too old to practice. Need to work on my standing though. But it is pretty to see.

Karl Lippard

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17 COMMENTS

  1. if you want to target practice at 400 yards with a handgun this might be the ticket. i think i would save a lot of money and just get a contendor. too far for my old eyes with either.

  3. Put up or shut up. Is it really that hard to find a 600yd range in Colorado? Stand at the base of the Front Range. Walk 600yds east. Turn around. Viola, 600yd range with a 5000 ft high backstop.

      • I wouldn’t think that Lippard should have any trouble finding a shooting range, but you’d be surprised at how hard it can be to find a good place to shoot along the Front Range.

        I grew up there, and back in the 1980s there were many public and private (but open) ranges from Fort Collins down to south Denver. You could also shoot just about anywhere in the foothills, as long as you weren’t in somebody’s backyard and you had a good backstop.

        Now that the Front Range consists of one nearly-continuous suburb from Fort Collins all the way to Pueblo, most of these ranges have become housing subdivisions. And most of the rest are private-only ranges with no public shooting and years-long waiting lists for membership.

        It was a shock to travel back there and not be able to shoot. We had to wait two hours for a noisy, crowded indoor range where the rental guns kept breaking. The Front Range used to be a great place to shoot, but now it just sucks.

    • Yes. There are few public ranges with target emplacements at 600 yards. There are actually very few public access ranges with rifle ranges beyond 300 yards.

      Whittington has excellent long distance ranges. It is, overall, a world-class range, and if you wanted to run a demonstration with cameras and the ability to close off an area to other firearms users for the duration of a demonstration, the Whittington has the ability to do this. I’ve been there several times this year and I think it will be well worth my time to keep paying the annual range fee to allow me to show up most any time to use the facilities, even when I’m no longer in the area.

  4. This is ridiculous. How fast would a 230 grain .45 bullet even be traveling when it reached the 600 yard mark?

    • Fast enough to punch paper – or a human. 550 ft/sec or perhaps a bit more or less. About 150 to 170 ft-lbs of kinetic energy.

      This is from typical numbers of a 230 grain FMJ pill (G1 Bc of about .180). Assuming these same numbers the 1000 yard velocity .45 ACP with a 230 grain ball pill is still over 400 fps.

      Want to play with some numbers? Start here:

      http://www.jbmballistics.com/ballistics/calculators/calculators.shtml

      Here’s something to consider: A 55gr FMJ pill from an AR-15 is packing about the same kinetic energy as the .45 230 ball at that range.

    • There’s a lot of ‘it depends’ but stuffing a 230 gr .153 BC TMJ at 922 FPS into a handy calculator says…

      552 FPS and if you are zero’d at 600 yards you need 27 to 28 feet of overhead space to accommodate the trajectory.

  7. I do not believe anyone can hit a traditional target at 1000 yards with a .45 acp fired from a 5″ barrel pistol. The exception would be to shoot it like a mortar at which point it may travel 1600 yards based on my research. Hitting what you intend to hit is an entirely different matter.

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