Video: Taya Kyle Nailing Targets at American Sniper Shootout

Earlier this month Taya Kyle, the widow of legendary Navy SEALs sniper Chris Kyle, stunned audiences after she beat champion shooter Bruce Piatt in a one-on-one shooting challenge held in Pflugerville, Texas. Videos of the event have finally started trickling out, showing the shooters going head-to-head and shooting from prone, kneeling, canted, and fully concealed positions at static and moving targets from 150 to 1,000 yards away. Using TrackingPoint’s new M600, M800, and XS1 rifles, Kyle was able to handily defeat Piatt, who used traditional rifles without TrackingPoint’s Precision-guided Firearm (PGF) technology.

Kyle scored a perfect 100 percent of her shots. As a novice shooter, she credited much of her victory to the rifles themselves and said she was in awe of the technology built into the guns.

“TrackingPoint precision-guided firearms are a stunning leap forward. If our soldiers had TrackingPoint weapons, lives would be saved and the world would be a much safer place,” Taya Kyle she said in a press release. “Our first responders and military members face situations most of us cannot imagine. They need every advantage for precision and efficiency to protect and serve while minimizing collateral damage and risk to themselves.”

You can see her surprise the audience with a quick shot on this moving target right out of the gate.

According to TrackingPoint CEO John McHale, it was time for the US military to get an upgrade.

“For the most part our military has modernized in the last 100 years,” he said. “The Navy has gone from sailing ships to aircraft carriers, and the Air Force has gone from prop planes to supersonic fighter jets. Meanwhile the Army is still fighting with guns that are the equivalent of prop planes. It’s time they upgraded to fighter jets.”

Bruce Piatt, who faced the PGF rifles with traditional firearms, couldn’t agree more.

“The technology in the TrackingPoint system became shockingly obvious when a novice shooter like Taya Kyle was able to complete the American Sniper Shootout without a miss. Just imagine if these were in the hands of our police and military units. I wish they were available when I was wearing a badge and coordinating the SWAT team.”

Had Piatt won the competition, he would’ve won $1 million from TrackingPoint. The NRA World Shooting Champion is not bitter about losing though, and he said that he was happy to participate.

“While I didn’t wake up a millionaire after yesterday’s American Sniper Shootout event put on by TrackingPoint, I have gained a wealth of new friends and memories that I value far more than any prize check,” he wrote on Facebook shortly after the event.

The American Sniper Shootout also raised $500,000 for the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation, a charity organization that supports military families and seeks to promote healthier relationships between soldiers and their loved ones.

You can see a montage of Taya Kyle shooting below:

Following the end of the competition, Taya Kyle also made a 2,100-yard shot with her XS1 rifle chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum. It was the same distance as the record shot that her husband Chris Kyle took in 2008 outside Sadr City, when he killed an insurgent about to fire on a US Army convoy. At the time, Chris Kyle called it nothing more than a “straight-up luck shot.”

Of course, one could hardly compare a stressful shot in a combat environment—with lives on the line—to the controlled atmosphere of a competition shooting, but Taya Kyle’s feat was impressive nonetheless.

There is no video of that shot available just yet, so here’s Taya and Bruce shooting a 1,000-yard target instead.

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