Deep in Virginia's Blue Ridge mountains lies the Black Bear Shooting Club, a sprawling outdoor facility that clings and flows over one of the ancient mountains. The morning October sun takes its time passing over peaks and into valleys, until suddenly the mountaintop is illuminated with a crown of flaming gold foliage. There have gathered over 50 teams of the greatest shooters in the nation, hailing from the military, law enforcement, and America's civilians. Many of them must remain nameless for now for national security reasons, but they're all here to challenge themselves at the Major Land Sniper Cup.
Major Land himself, of course, is a name that we all know. After the conclusion of the conflict in Vietnam, Major Edward "Jim" Land worked with Maj. Richard Culver Jr. to create the first United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper school. Here at the NRA, we have a special place in our hearts for Land, who served as secretary of the National Rifle Association from 1994 to 2015. At 90, this legend of precision shooting and Second Amendment advocacy still makes the yearly pilgrimage to the sniper competition that bears his name.
"In the long-range shooting community, especially the military long-range and sniping community, Major Land is a legend," said Capstone Precision Group's Emil Praslick. "You know, the first guy that basically stood up the whole Marine Corps sniper program. And I'm an old Army guy, but I gotta admit, the Marines probably do it better than anybody else."
The Major Land Sniper Cup is a gathering of the best of the best snipers in America, and the courses-of-fire reflect this. There are 10 stages, some of which require shooting across valleys, at downward angles, and at moving targets. This is the type of precision shooting that requires both intensive attention to the tiniest factors and the nearly preternatural instinct born from years--decades, even--of experience. Forget simple considerations like differences in bullet weight and powder charge. At distances that exceed 1,300 yards, a 2-mph breeze rising from a sun-warmed rock is enough to make a difference in the point of impact.
In fact, one of the highlights of the Major Land Sniper Cup for the competitors is the chance to discuss the fine points of sniping. Dubbed the Gathering of Snipers Symposium, the event allows for informal information-swaps in sniping technology and new tactics, and eager participants stayed engaged for hours after the event had been forecasted to end. NRA's Peter Churchbourne noted, "The level of training offered at this event is something you won't see anywhere else. Essentially, there are thousands of dollars' worth of expert training that happens even before the match begins."
Berger Bullets' Jim Harris, one of the Symposium presenters, agrees, noting that compensating for wind direction in this mountainous terrain is challenging even for advanced snipers. "There's no Rosetta Stone for this," he said. "no Einsteinian unified theory of everything. All I do is give them a grounding, a process, and then some basic general tactics." (Berger, together with Vihtavuori and Lapua as part of the Capstone Group, sponsors and supports the Major Land Sniper Cup by providing ammunition and other products for the competitors to use, as well as contributing to the prize table.)
As valuable as this chance to network with other elite shooters was, it was only the prelude. The morning the competition began, the shooters waited in a shaded hollow for the safety briefing--yes, even at this level, there is always a safety briefing--excitement building as the mountain warmed in the light. Excitement for the competition, yes, but mainly for the chance to meet the legendary Major Land and receive a challenge coin from his hands. "Don't forget," joked Major Land to all assembled, "remember your sight alignment and trigger control!"
A huge laugh erupted from the crowd--it's like reminding a jet-fighter pilot where the throttle is--and the individual teams began to disperse to their stages. "This is our third year," said Land, "and it's improving every year. The Black Bear Shooting Club does a fantastic job."
The story of Major Land's creation of the Marine Scout Sniper Program is fairly well-known in the world of precision shooting, but many NRA Members don't know just how impactful this was.
"The snipers in Marine Corps, there wasn't such a thing," Land said. "The way it happened is that I ran into an army shooter that had gone through the Canadian Sniper School. We were looking for something, because you can only give the commanding general so many pot-metal trophies before he starts asking, 'Well, what are you doing for the Marine Corps?' so to speak. We decided that we were going to start a sniper school.
And the warrant officer said, 'Well, that's not gonna work because we don't have an MOS, we don't have the equipment' and so on. I said, 'Well, let's call it a scout sniper program.' The commanding officers for the regiments are always looking for training for their scout. So we'll call it a scout sniper program, and then when we get 'em over here, we'll teach 'em what we want to teach 'em. And that's essentially how we started."
What a lot of people don't know is that, even as Maj. Land was building a family of Marine snipers, he was building his own family. "He won the regionals match on my birthday," said his son Ed. "One of his fellow competitors looked over at him while he was shooting and asked him if he was leaving. Recalled Major Land, "He asked me if I was going to the hospital. I thought he was joking until he told me, "My wife just took your wife to the hospital; she's in labor!"
Major Land responded by rushing to the hospital, rifle still slung over his shoulder because his car's trunk wouldn't lock. Things were different in those days, and the doctors and nurses weren't upset about the firearm, just glad that he'd made it in time for the birth. "Then," recalled Major Land, "I went back and won the match."
One of the Sniper Cup's most popular events is the Army vs. Navy Grudge Match. Anyone with military experience knows that the "grudge" in question is both a very serious point of pride and a running joke. This competition pits the best marksmen from each branch against one another, and the 2024 Grudge was taken by the Army team. The Marine Scout Sniper Association commented, "While the loss stung, it’s only fueling the SSA’s determination to reclaim the title in 2025. Rest assured, The new Scout Sniper Association Shooting team is already gearing up to bring the trophy back where it belongs—with the Marine Corps Scout Snipers!"
As for who won the 2024 Major Land Sniper Cup, that's easy enough: Team 23, Ryan Beck and Ryan McCullough, who ran away with a score of 252. Many of the other winners on the leaderboard are identified only by team number, since their names are currently not public. The second-place winning team is identified only as Team 91, with a score of 244. This is due to their military service, but the top shooters aren't always enlisted or commissioned. It's actually not uncommon for civilians to do very, very well at this competition. (The 2023 competition had featured a 14-year-old girl who would have taken top honors if she'd been shooting alone, reported Land.)
Whatever path may have taken these competitors to the Blue Ridge Mountains, it must have been the right one. They stood on the mountain, breathing the rare air at the top of the world and the top of their game. As the sun turned autumn foliage from gold to flame, rifles were shouldered in anticipation of that critical word: FIRE.
Images courtesy facebook.com/MajorLandSniperCup
Video courtesy Youtube.com/@MarineScoutSniperAssociation
