I have attended Sanford since before there was the PGCA/LCSCA "Shoot-out." I do not shoot because I am blind in my right eye and cannot see perhaps half of the crossing birds. I have learned to shoot left handed and do some trapshooting, at clays and live birds. But I know my limitations and do not lobby to make other people's sport "handicap" accessible.
In this context, making the Shoot-out "more fair" is just an euphemism for making winners out of losers. Or as so often heard at the GAH, "Who will be right at the right time." Yet the Sanford event is not the GAH. From my view--strictly as an interested spectator--the present simplified format allows the PGCA and LCSCA to chose up sides and showcase their favoriate guns. What more do you want? Should the PGCA pick the LCSCA team? Or who decides if someone's shooting prowess is a disqualification?
Quoting from my new book--Chapter 40: "When Losers Get to be Winners"--an editorial in an 1886 issue of Shooting & Fishing stated that "It is now the annual order to create a system by which contestants at regular tournaments shall win if they lose. The delicate problem of adjusting the competition is to devise ways and means for, say, ten 60% shooters to defeat one 90% shooter, without hurting anyone's feelings."
I say leave the sleeping dog lie.
In the live bird ring, no one gets a free ride. All start at 31 yards, kill 5 in a row, step back a yard. I take my chances (zero and none), and consider my "winnings" to be the privilege of having shot against the best of the best. Query: If the winning format at Sanford is changed so that good shooters are handicapped or excluded, and losers get to be winners, then will anyone but the "personal best" shooters care about who wins or loses what becomes a lottery of rule making.
However, if you do decide to re-write the rules,I believe that every right-handed shooter should have to wear a patch over his right eye and shoot left handed--it's only fair! EDM