BGC Member Spotlight – Lon Layton
Lon Layton, BGC member since 2007
You are a new shooter who just got his Concealed Carry permit and wants to learn more so you sign up for your first International Defensive Pistol Association match. On your first stage, you are told to imagine you are closing up at your family-owned jewelry shop. As you walk through the doorway a laser beam is tripped, releasing an electro-magnet which sends a silhouette target of a “bad guy” racing toward you on a 30-foot metal track until it turns and disappears just as it stops 6 feet from you…You walk away from the stage with your adrenaline pumping and you are hooked on IDPA for life! This kind of great experience is repeated monthly at our club and is largely thanks to Mr. Lon Layton, whose ingenuity, technical skills and dedication all come together as the IDPA Match Director at Buccaneer Gun Club.
Under his leadership, what began over a decade ago with a handful of club members shooting stationary targets, has now grown into our club hosting open matches for the public with an average of 5 squads and over 40 shooters a month. New competitors are especially welcome, including ladies and youth who Lon patiently helps orient to the sport. Always a strong mentor for all of the shooting sports, and himself a skilled gun smith and Range Safety Officer, Lon volunteers his time teaching shooters the ropes on everything from equipment selection, stage strategies and even ammunition reloading for maximum success.
He uses his creativity and impressive mechanical skills to research, design and build real-world defensive scenario stages that keep shooters coming back match after match. Need an ATM machine to simulate a bank robbery stage? Sure! How about a hydraulically-controlled disappearing head target in a window? No problem. Over the past 12 years, Lon has spent thousands of hours designing and building stages and props for our matches. He spends evenings on his computer writing out detailed stage scenarios and layout diagrams and comes to the club the days beforehand to test and set up the elaborate stages. A testament to his skills is that we have competitors who regularly drive over 3 hours round trip from their own clubs around the region to shoot the matches he designs. He also volunteers his time helping other clubs with their matches, both on the local and regional levels and his leadership has inspired dozens of other folks to come out and volunteer working the matches and becoming Range Safety Officers themselves.