Chained to a Kettlebell, dragging a dummy through the desert, with cannibals on your trail. Shooter ready?
InRangeTV Brutality is a competition series unlike any other. Built for the community that attends it, with the tagline “We considered fair, but decided against it”, Brutality matches are exciting, difficult, and will test your skills. If you haven’t shown up to shoot a match, you’re missing out.
FROM HANDGUN TO CQB
Held at the Southern Utah Practical Shooting Range (SUPS) in St. George, Utah, InRangeTV’s CQB Brutality-West shares a lot of DNA with the Handgun Brutality match that InRangeTV has held at this location in years past. But this is more than just a name change and some modified rule sets.
CQB Brutality introduces new divisions, including Shotgunner and Cyberpunk, as well as the option for two shooters to work together as a team. The match also has returning divisions like Dead Eye, PCC, Service Pistol, and more.
The style and flavor of the match remain the same as years past, but 2025 amped up the props, physical challenges, and vibe of the match. Having shot this match the past several years in a row, it’s been great to see the evolution and improvements year over year. While individual stages from years past might stand out as some of my all-time favorites, it’s easy to say that the match as a whole has done nothing but gotten better every year. An impressive feat even for Brutality.
SHOOTING IS HARD, BRING A FRIEND
Something entirely new to CQB Brutality was Cyberpunk Gang War division that allowed teams of two shooters to complete the course of fire at the same time. Each shooter fell under the Cyberpunk rules in terms of individual gear, but both shooters would be on the clock at the same time.
Most of the stages used two bays and required an individual shooter to move from bay to bay at some point in the COF. Depending on the stage, Gang War teams might have one shooter in one bay and one shooter in the other bay, each engaging targets or completing tasks as required. This opened interesting opportunities to complete stages extremely quickly, but only if the team was able to work together.
Clearing hallways, if done well, could be completed quickly with one shooter clearing one side and the other shooter clearing the other side.
For some teams, the addition of a second shooter and having to plan out a two-person stage plan ultimately cost more time than it saved. But time isn’t everything. Shooting as a team has its own reward, one that individual shooters can’t experience.
This is the kind of new and exciting things you can find at Brutality matches that simply aren’t offered elsewhere.
MATCH REVIEW
One Brutality run is great, but more is better if you can handle it. For me, that meant shooting both days available to the public and doing it with two different sets of kit. Getting to see the match from different perspectives not only makes for a great experience but also helps inform me personally on what I need to work on as a shooter.
As with all Brutality matches, it’s wise to think of the match as at least 50% training exercise, 50% match.
Props & Stage Design
The difference between a good match and a great experience comes down to curating an environment. A good shooting match is a good shooting match because of the targets, layout, and requirements of the stage. But a great experience requires a bit of theater. CQB Brutality-West had both.
From a disembowled cannibal corpse to a derpy horse to make your getaway on to stealing locks from a Star Wars Imperial officer with Groku strapped to your back to wiring dynamite for detonation, every stage offered its own story under an overall theme. Each stage also worked well with or without the added accoutrements, a fact that speaks to how well designed the stages were, but also at how the props were integrated into them.
Form didn’t get in the way of function, but function wasn’t left without form. This balance is much harder to achieve than it sounds, but this match had it.
PCC Run: Springfield Armory Kuna
Using a BOSS Commander SWAT suppressor, Vortex Defender XL red dot, and shooting 147gr Super Vel Hush Puppy ammo, the Kuna performed amazingly during the entire match. The only issue came due to the dust found in Southern Utah, a red dirt that creeps into everything and leaves nothing left untouched. If you let it, it will jam your weapons and magazines. Thankfully, all it took was cleaning just one magazine that got buried in the dirt after having a 100lb dummy dragged over it to solve the issue.
PCC is one of my favorite platforms to shoot in a competition, and the Kuna is a wonderful PCC, especially for this kind of match. While the Kuna isn’t a race burning PCC, Brutality’s format and style don’t really require a racer PCC either. What is required is durability, consistency, and being able to shoot when your blood is rushing.
While not designed as a PCC match, CQB Brutality is one of the best places to run a PCC because of the extended ranges, troublesome shooting positions, and the need to make good hits even when you’re spent. Something that stands out to me when I shoot PCC here is how much easier it feels and how much less effort is required from me.
Prone in the dirt, straddling a barrel horse prop, or riding in the back of an ATV, the PCC biggest advantage is how much less mental and physical effort is required from the shooter to achieve nearly the same result.
And then there are times in a stage where you have 30 rounds on tap and a target-rich environment, and you can’t help to just start blasting.
Special thanks to Super Vel for providing ammo for this match. The 147gr Hush Puppy is a subsonic load that left me entirely impressed. Running perfectly all match, the ammo was extremely consistent and entirely reliable. I chose subsonic because I was shooting suppressed, and the combination is always nice when you can get away with it. Even on spinners or at falling steel at 50+ yards, the 147gr ammo at 950 FPS was more than enough to get the job done every time. Combined with the BOSS Commander SWAT and the package was wonderfully quiet.
Service Pistol Run: Shadow Systems XR920P
This pistol, over the last year, has become my go-to pistol that comes with me when I need something that will work no matter what. The pistol I trust to get the job done, even when everything else isn’t working just right.
The insidious dirt of Southern Utah is just such a case. Having had multiple firearms fall apart last year at Handgun Brutality 2024, the XR920P came with this year because I knew it would work. Thankfully, that trust wasn’t misplaced.
While USPSA or IDPA, or other pistol-focused matches are good for their own reasons, Brutality with nothing but a pistol is, in my mind, a much better benchmark for where your pistol skills are really at. Large targets, small targets, close targets, far targets, targets while you are moving, targets that move, targets that fall, and a dozen other kinds of targets are all seen at CQB Brutality, and none of them are particularly easy. Every stage is hard for one reason other another, and if it wasn’t hard just based on the targets, then it’s hard because of the kettlebell you have chained to your waist or the buckets of “gold” you’ve stolen and need to get to your horse.
Because of all of this, Service Pistol might be the hardest division to shoot CQB Brutality in because of the wide range of shooting skills it requires and how unforgiving it is when you screw up.
As mentioned before, PCC requires a lot less effort from the shooter and so more brain power can be spent on the stage design and targets. I found this out personally after shooting a totally clean match on Saturday with PCC, to eating 75 seconds in penalties on Sunday shooting Service Pistol. Though since this Brutality, 75 seconds in penalties was only two individual penalties. One failure to engage (60 seconds) and one failure to neutralize the HVT (15 seconds). At Brutality, penalties are severe.
LOOSE ROUNDS
InRangeTV’s Brutality matches are my personal favorite to shoot for a list of reasons. If you’re considering giving one a try, I would highly recommend it. CQB Brutality is an especially good one to try due to the match being less physical than other Brutality formats.
If you want to get in on the Brutality action, take a look at the website for match dates.
