Free Rifles, Free Components, Free Education: Introducing the Community Build Program
- mac3175
- 3 hours ago
- 12 min read
Two years.
That is what went into this before today. Not two years of planning it. Two years of building it. We spent that time in the UK, in Japan, in Ireland, and on ranges across the United States. In the pits, on the line, and in parking lots after the last relay, where the conversations that actually matter tend to happen.
We sat with world champions and national champions. With league owners. With the people whose names carry weight in these sports and whose opinion of an idea can end it in a single sentence. Then we walked away from all of them and went and talked to the shooters nobody interviews, and to the fans who have never fired a shot in a match and show up anyway.
We asked two questions everywhere we went, and we asked them in that order.
What do you need?
What do you want?
Those are not the same question, and the gap between the two answers is where this entire program lives. Today, Black Plague Precision launches the Community Build Program. It is the largest undertaking of our life and, as far as we can find, the largest collective effort of its kind this industry has ever attempted. Forty of the top companies in long-range precision are behind it.
Every bit of it is free. Here is how we got here, and what it is.
Two years of building before we said a word
We could have announced this twenty four months ago. That is how most of these things go. A launch post, a hashtag, a weekend event with a good photographer, and then silence. Not because the people behind them do not care, but because announcing is easy and building is not, and without something real underneath it there is nothing left to point at six months later.
So here is what those twenty four months actually were. Flights to the UK, Japan, and Ireland, and range time all across the United States. Calls and emails to hundreds of companies who had no obligation to pick up the phone. Sitting with match directors and asking the unglamorous question, which is not what they love about their match, but what breaks when a brand new shooter walks up cold. Writing curriculum. Building rifles. Standing up a working reloading operation. Running quiet pilots and watching several of our own assumptions fall apart, which is the entire reason you pilot something before you launch it.
We also were not willing to ask this industry to fund something we would not fund ourselves. While those companies were committing product, we were writing checks of our own. Cinema cameras. Photography bodies and glass. Action cameras, lighting, and microphones. A dedicated reloading and filming space built out from nothing, and a new podcast studio alongside it. If we were going to ask companies to invest in this community, we were not going to do it from the sidelines with our hands in our pockets. They invested in us. We invested right back.
The standard never moved. Build something this industry has not seen. Not a bigger version of what already exists. Not a booth with a banner and a sign-up sheet. Something with enough structure behind it, and enough time in front of it, to actually change who ends up behind a rifle.
That is why this is not a launch week or a summer campaign. Two years of preparation are behind us. Two years of programming are ahead of us. A shorter commitment would have been marketing, and it would not have moved the needle for the community or for the sponsors who put real product on the line to make it happen.
Nothing we launch today is theoretical. All of it has already been run on real people.
Why it had to move offline
Anyone operating in this space knows what has happened over the last several years. The regulatory and platform environment has tightened to the point where it is genuinely difficult for a company in this industry to do the most basic thing a company does, which is show people what it makes. Advertising channels close. Accounts get restricted. Content gets throttled or removed with no explanation and no appeal. Platform and payment policy shifts under everyone's feet on a schedule nobody controls.
The damage runs both directions. Companies building exceptional products cannot get them in front of the people who would love them. And the curious newcomer, the person with nobody to ask, has fewer and fewer places to go learn. The front door to these sports keeps getting narrower, and it is not because interest went away.
So we stopped fighting for reach on platforms that do not want us there and went offline instead. We will still publish everything. The video, the education, the build content, all of it goes up, because reach still matters wherever we can get it. But the heart of this program happens in person, on real ranges, with real rifles, in front of real people. This is grassroots in the original sense of the word. Hands on gear, boots on the ground, shooter to shooter, bringing long-range precision in all of its disciplines directly to the community.
The walls between these sports
Growing the number of shooters is the obvious goal. It is not the only one. Long-range precision is not one sport. It is several, bound together by the same fundamentals and separated by almost everything else. Precision rifle shooting, the PRS style discipline most people picture first. F-Class. Benchrest. Extreme Long Range. Fullbore. Airgun. Every one of them has its own rules, its own gear culture, its own champions, and its own roster of companies doing exceptional work. And every one of them has quietly built walls around itself.
Ask a PRS shooter to explain the rules of F-Class. Ask an F-Class shooter to name the current king of 2 miles. Ask a benchrest competitor which bags and barricades are winning positional stages. Ask a positional shooter what a benchrest loading bench looks like and why every charge on it is weighed to the kernel. Ask any of them what modern precision airgun is capable of, and watch the face they make before they find out they are wrong.
Most of them cannot tell you. Not because they are not good. Because nobody ever showed them. That is a real loss, because the crossover is extraordinary. The load development standards benchrest and F-Class treat as routine will change what a PRS shooter believes is possible out of his rifle. The positional work and time pressure of a PRS match will make a bench shooter dangerous anywhere that is not a bench. Fullbore builds position and sling discipline that almost nobody in the American practical world has ever been taught. Airgun is the cheapest and most accessible wind education on earth, at a fraction of the cost and with a fraction of the range requirement, and it feeds every discipline above it. Extreme Long Range forces you to actually understand your solver instead of trusting it.
The same wall exists on the company side. There are manufacturers in this industry building world class product who are effectively invisible outside the one discipline they serve, not because their work does not translate, but because the audience never gets exposed to it. So the goal is not just more long-range shooters. It is multi-discipline long-range shooters. People who have shot across the lanes, who understand what each one demands, and who know exactly who is building the best gear in each of them. That shooter is better, buys more confidently, and does more for these sports than a specialist who never once looked sideways.
What we are actually doing
This is not a fund, a scholarship, or an awareness campaign. It is a schedule of things happening on real ranges with real gear in front of real people.
Semi annual networking events. Hosted and filmed by us, free to attend. Come out, meet the people and the companies behind the products, and put your hands on gear you have only ever seen in photos. No ticket, no pitch, no obligation.
Range days. The heart of the program. We bring new and newer shooters out and put them behind custom built rifles across the disciplines. Not one rifle and not one style. You shoot a PRS setup, then an F-Class rig, then a benchrest gun, then an airgun, and you find out which discipline actually fits you before you spend a dollar figuring that out the hard way.
Side stages at matches. We are working with match directors to run side stages at existing matches, so a competitor who is already there for the weekend can step off his own line and try something from a discipline he has never touched.
Shooting tutorials at the range. Instruction on the fundamentals, taught for each discipline, because what makes you good on a bench and what makes you good under a time limit are not the same skill.
Rifle assembly and disassembly. Hands on. You take the rifle apart and you put it back together yourself. Not a video of somebody else's hands doing it.
How to spec a build, and who to trust. This might be the most valuable thing on the list and almost nobody teaches it. How to choose components, how to evaluate a smith or a builder before you send money, what questions to ask, and where newer shooters routinely get taken advantage of. Straight answers, no brand loyalty required.
Load development for every discipline. Reloading is where the largest gains in this sport are hiding, and the requirements are not the same from one discipline to the next. We work through development for each of them, on real equipment, with the components in your hands.
That is the starting list. It is not the finished one. As this rolls out, match directors and ranges and shooters are going to tell us what else it needs, and we built this program with the room and the runway to say yes.
Our core fortys
This is the part that still gets us.
Forty One of the top companies in long-range precision are partnered on this project. Competitors. Companies serving disciplines that never overlap. Companies that have, in some cases, never been in the same room on anything. All of them behind the same effort at the same time.
Nothing like this has been undertaken in this industry, and we do not say that lightly. What they gave was not a logo placement. They donated product, equipment, components, and support at a scale that is the only reason the rest of this article exists. Their donations are what let us build complete rifles across multiple disciplines instead of talking about them.
What let us stand up a real reloading operation instead of a demonstration table. What let us put rounds downrange for people who have never fired a shot, film every bit of it, and hand all of it away.
Which brings us to the most important sentence in this article. All of it is free. The shooting is free. The components are free. The education is free. The video and the guides are free. No course fee, no membership, no upsell waiting at the end of a funnel. That is not a posture, it is a budget, funded by these sponsors and out of Black Plague Precision's own pocket
.
That is an enormous amount of trust to be handed. Our only real goal is to be great stewards of it. A commitment like this must be recognized, respected, and mostly appreciated. A commitment to our community like no other. Below our the Core Fourty!
AIM Field Sports
MAD Creations
March Scopes Global
Read that list again, slowly. Then go look at what each of those companies actually makes, because there are names on it you have never bought from and probably should have. The entire thesis of this program is sitting right there in one list.
The rifles... So Far
The website, and where this lands in two years
If you visit the site today you will find a mixture of the old and the new. That is on purpose, and it is honest. We dropped version 2.0 this past January, built specifically as the starting point for this program, and we are on 2.1 now. What you are looking at is a foundation, not a finished product.
What we have always wanted this site to be is a single place where long-range precision information actually lives together. Right now that information is scattered. It sits in forums, buried in comment sections, split across a dozen discipline-specific corners of the internet that do not talk to each other, and mixed in with plenty of advice from people who have no business giving it. Finding a straight answer takes hours, and knowing whether the answer you found is trustworthy takes experience you do not have yet if you are new.
So we are building the consolidation. Trusted information, in one place, from people who actually compete and actually build. We still feature our own work, because that is not going anywhere. The difference now is that we point you in the right direction for each discipline instead of only showing you ours. If you land on the site curious about F-Class, you should leave knowing where to go next in F-Class.
That is the two-year target. By the end of this program the site will hold a complete reloading and rifle building guide with a separate path for each discipline, because a benchrest load workup and a PRS load workup are not the same job and should not be taught as though they were.
Free to everyone, permanently. No account, no paywall, no email gate.
We are not there yet. Give us a bit of time and keep checking back, because it grows every month this program runs.
The ask is simple
Follow the work. All of our platforms, but YouTube and Instagram above the rest, because that is where the builds, the range days, and the tutorials are going to live. Comment, like, share. That sounds like small stuff, and in an industry where reach gets throttled and accounts get restricted with no explanation, it is not small at all. Engagement is the only thing that puts this content in front of the next person who needs it. Every share is a shooter we did not have to go find ourselves.
Then the one that matters more. Go show some love to our sponsors.
Look them up. Follow them. Buy from them when you are in the market. Tell them you saw them here. What these forty companies committed to this program goes well beyond a normal sponsorship, and they did it with no guarantee of what they would get back for it. If this article accomplishes one single thing, let it be that.
P.S. Signing up for the newsletter would go a long way as well.
Where this goes
Two years ago this was a conversation about why sports this good are this hard to walk into, and why the people already inside them know so little about each other. Today it is four countries of groundwork, forty companies, a fleet of rifles, a reloading program, a production schedule, and an open door.
We will publish what happens, including the parts that do not flatter us. If we are asking this many companies to put their product behind something, they are owed the accounting.
Long-range precision is worth spreading. Let's get to work.
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