[BlueTrain]

Let me just say two things here.

First, shooting just costs more than I'm willing to spend. Period. As I said, the range membership alone is prohibitive. Clark Brothers in Warrenton has a free range that you can use if you buy their ammunition, which seems fair enough, and I have shot there, but it's nearly 50 miles from where I sit. It's a lot closer to where I work, however, and I've actually been out there at lunchtime to pick up a special order.

But returning to the subject of handguns and courses. I can see there would be a lot of value in actually competing with your actual carry gun, if they would let you. It might make you rethink your choice of a carry gun, though, at least for a while. You could decide that you really should be carrying a (physically) bigger gun and you switch for a couple of months until the weather started getting hot and it started to seem a little harder. So you switch back to the original gun (you otherwise don't switch carry guns, do you?) that you had spent so much time thinking about already.

It might also put you off on competitions, too, unless you imagine that a course which requires three magazines worth of ammo to finish is realistic. That's probably a bigger issue and to attempt a course with a five-shot revolver (or a single action, perhaps) is a nonstarter. That isn't to say there isn't a club somewhere that has a more realistic (fewer shots) course set up.

If nothing else, competition forces you to take a harder look at everything without the element of real danger but with real pressure.