[Tailback]

I go to a range here in Oregon to shoot High power matches and two of the best shooters are tenured university professors. Many of the other better shooters are machinists, i guess because they get cheap homemade parts or something!?! Seriously though, most of the hardcore match shooters I see a lot are very wealthy professional white-collar types.

[Shooter 2.5]

I can answer that one. I'm a retired machinist and only three things can go wrong when you're shooting High Power. You, the rifle or the ammo. A lot of people can see where the ammo can fail because if failures to fire and jams. they can also see where they themselves can fail by screwing up a shot, going too fast or slow and not reading the wind. Not too many people can understand when their rifle fails. Loose sights, loose bedding, the barrel finally wearing out.
I shot this one match rifle and I could never get it to work right and I noticed the rear sight was loose. It was like that from the factory. I had to send it back to get it replaced. The front sight on my AR loosened up and I had to set-screw it into place. A friend had a 2000 dollar rifle that never shot as good as he thought. He sold it and the guy who bought it immediately noticed a wrong lead angle to the barrel. It cost less than a 100 dollars to get it fixed and my friend never shot High Power after that. My friend could have sent it back to the maker but he just didn't have the experience to know better. If you practice as much as you can without getting better, have someone check out the rifle.