IPS C G AS TEIZ

T HE U G LY T R U T H

IPSC in Spain has gone a long way downwards from its origins. Now, with a brilliant future at our backs, it’s time to reveal the role played by our club in the current state of affairs.

Let’s go back several years:

It was a dark and stormy night.

It was 1995, and the Spanish shooting clubs were mainly devoted to defend the interests of precision shooters. At the same time, they looked in distrust at a new race of "gunmen" (sorry, that was “gunpersons”) that practiced, in a semi-clandestine way, a new variety of “practical” shooting, known as IPSC. And then, a bunch of loonies decided that the need for a club exclusively focused on IPSC had arisen: We had to show the world that we, IPSC shooters, were worthless, despicable beings, untrustworthy, gluttons, drinkers, womanizers (or manizers, whatever the preferences), unshaven, and, in general terms, the kind of people moms don’t want around their daughters.

And, also, we made fun of everything.

In that spirit, in 1995 we agreed the foundation, between Barcelona and Vitoria, of the IPSC Gasteiz, with the healthy intention of demonstrating that the precision guys were right when distrusting our shadowy purposes.

At the end of 1995, at a bar of the Ullibarri-Gamboa Swamp, we held (terribly drunken) the foundational meeting of the IPSC Gasteiz (1st Assembly), agreement that was ratified the following day (through a frightening hangover) with the signature of the foundational act in a whorehouse at Vitoria’s old quarter. Unfortunately, certain personal differences among their members brought to the dissolution of the Club in the first days of 1996 (talk about long-lasting agreements).

With such a brilliant background, we took the decision of re-founding the Club in Barcelona. For the constitution of the 2nd Assembly, we brought the standards even lower and we accepted amongst us computer geeks, lawyers, policemen, economists and other wrongdoers and wronglivers. The foundational meeting took place in the restaurant Moncho's of Barcelona where, fully cyanotics after a sumptuous dinner, we achieved the assistants to sign anything (two of them, the table cloth). Once the signatures gotten, we began the bureaucratic calvary that bears the legalization of any association in Spain, steps that prolonged until October 1999, when the IPSC Gasteiz (2nd Assembly) was inscribed with the number 10.508 in the Register of Sport Entities of the Generalitat of Catalunya.

At the present time, IPSC Gasteiz is constituted as Sport Entity without spirit of profit (well, in fact it’s “without possibility of profit"), and whose patrimony consists in two thousand 9 Largo and eight hundred 9 Parabellum cases, a bicolor pen and a (half-filled) bicarbonate bottle.

Glory days await us. They'll better await seated.