ISSF 50 meter pistol
sport shooting event
50 meter pistol, formerly and unofficially still often called Free Pistol, is one of the ISSF shooting events. It is one of the oldest shooting disciplines, dating back to the 19th century and only having seen marginal rule changes since 1936. It is considered to provide some of the purest precision shooting among the pistol events. The target of this event has not changed since 1900, and the 50m distance has remained the standard since 1912. The sport traced back to the beginning of indoor Flobert pistol parlour shooting in Europe during the 1870s.
Most shooters excelling in 50 m pistol also compete at the same level in 10 meter air pistol, a similar precision event. Free pistol was removed from the Olympic programme following the 2016 Olympic Games.
Equipment
The pistol used must be chambered in caliber .22 Long Rifle ammunition, may only be loaded with one round at a time, and must have conventional "open" or "iron" sights (i.e. optical and laser sights are not allowed). It must also be held and operated by one hand, the trigger actuated by squeezing (not releasing), and may not be supported by any other part of the shooter's body.
“ISSF 50 meter pistol” enters the record as sport shooting event. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ISSF, meter and pistol can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“ISSF 50 meter pistol” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, ISSF, meter and pistol provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1072130. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1900, 1912 and 2016.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “ISSF 50 meter pistol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.