The 8th Pan Amer­i­can Hand­gun Cham­pi­onships kicked off this week­end host­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Pis­tol Shoot­ing Con­fed­er­a­tion held at the Uni­ver­sal Shoot­ing Acad­e­my, Frost­prof Flori­da.

The match saw the best of the best from over 40 coun­tries bat­tling over a 4-day pe­ri­od. Rain, mud and sun chal­lenged all Shoot­ers to bring their "A" game to fo­cus on their tech­niques and strate­gies.

Amongst them was Top Sport Shoot­er from Trinidad and To­ba­go Nicholas "Ac­tion" Ali who placed 43rd over­all Open Di­vi­sion.

Ali said, "It was the first time I shot on the world stage against these great ath­letes, al­so the first time us­ing ma­jor pow­er fac­tor am­mu­ni­tion de­spite not hav­ing my firearm tuned for it".

Ma­jor Pow­er Fac­tor is a type of bul­let with a high­er charge than reg­u­lar am­mu­ni­tion what our lo­cal Shoot­ers are lim­it­ed to in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

"On day one I re­al­ized my nor­mal shoot­ing tim­ing was much slow­er and my mag­a­zines could on­ly hold 22 rounds to­tal with­out get­ting jammed up, the oth­er open shoot­er had 28-plus."

De­spite the chal­lenges, Ali was able to ad­just and fo­cus on his game plan ul­ti­mate­ly be­ing the on­ly Trinida­di­an in the top 50.

Ali said "if we had the type of am­mu­ni­tion used in these In­ter­na­tion­al match­es in Trinidad I would have been much bet­ter pre­pared as the re­coil is to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent"

Oth­er shoot­ers from Trinidad and To­ba­go al­so were in at­ten­dance: Dave Ram­lal, Nawaz Karim, Jude Gor­don, Luke Hadeed and Richard Hop­kin­son.