Thanks to staff writer Eric B. for sharing this IG video. USPSA Grandmaster Rob Chavous shot a USPSA match and experienced an uncommon equipment failure. Was it optic suicide or warranted sentence for desertion?

The video that Eric shared was posted by @125fmj

But the original video was posted on @rob.chavous IG account. 125FMJ zoomed in so you could see the optic commit suicide.

Optics jumping ship from a pistol is not uncommon especially for competitors shooting carry optics division in USPSA. They are shooting 150-200 rounds every match. Add in there practice round count and if the competitor competes in multiple matches a month. They could easily be shooting 1,000 rounds a month. That is a lot of abuse on a slide mounted optic. If you recall, Russia gave orders to its commanding officers to shoot deserters during WWII. Is that what happened here? The optic jumped ship and Rob shot it for deserting him?

Taking a look at Rob’s IG page here is a photo of the pistol he was using. It is a CZ Shadow 2.

The suicidal optic? A Leupold Deltapoint Pro. What is truly surprising is that the Deltapoint Pro was not that badly damaged from being shot. Rob is a Grand Master (GM) in USPSA production class. So perhaps it is partially luck mixed with those sweet GM skills that avoided completely killing the Deltapoint Pro. Perhaps it was a warning shot for deserting him mid-stage?

All jokes aside, this is a remarkable accident. Not only did the optic screws fail, but the timing of the falling optic happened to fall into the path of Rob’s second shot. As a fellow competitive shooter, I can attest to being so target focused that small things like an optic falling off could be missed at first. This is a sad but funny moment. Sad that Rob shot his own optic but funny because it didn’t happen to us. At least no one was hurt and we can all use this as an example to check our equipment and hope they don’t jump off and commit optic suicide.