This is Part 1 of the full transcript of an interview with Craig Ouzen, a National Champion, Multigun Competitor. Watch the FULL VIDEO.

Craig: To give you some history. So I grew up competing. I grew up shooting trap shooting, competed quite a bit, and got into college. That, of course, you know, busy with school and everything that kind of went away, wound up getting a job as a firefighter and had a couple of pistols.

I was interested in that. There were guys there that said, if you really want to see people shoot fast and shoot well, USPSA is where it’s at. And so I went the USPSA route and started shooting USPSA pistol. And this was somewhere in early 2000 maybe late nineties -- started shooting some PSA matches, got very interested in it, progressed quickly through getting better gear, and got more interested.

There’s a classification system in the USPSA. So I had my sights set on going up the classification tables, and I was in the midst of that and our local club had some guys that said, Hey, do you want to shoot Three Gun? And I’d never really heard of it. I’d seen it in a couple of magazines.

So this was still back at a time where there was a big match called Soldier of Fortune out there. And that’s kind of what you would see. I had never, I didn’t really have a shotgun set up for it, but I was like, yeah, kind of, you know, what the heck? And it wasn’t really too much of a formal match.

It was a few guys locally that had set up some targets and get together on the extra Saturday on months they had five Saturdays and so they’d have a little three-gun match and I was kind of hooked. It was interesting right, the USPSA pistol can get very very technical and very, very granular on how you shoot a stage and how you move through the stage in your stage planning, and and three gun just never gets that granular because you’ve got three times the amount of guns going on.

You’ve got three times the amount of target going on and the stage is more complicated. So it’s it was a little more variant. It was a little more exciting that way. And I started shooting Three Gun started traveling the same way that you would do to any other kind of shooting match and started traveling around the country to some different matches.

And just timing was right. I was getting into Three Gun as it was growing and it eventually kind of boomed. I was shooting pretty well at the time, starting to place very well at national level events when regional level events, won local matches all the time, eventually made it to where won some national level events. Right. And it was kind of at the height the Three Gun started getting some sponsorship and some support and that carried on through, you know, say, the 2011, 2010 until just a few years ago.

And I kind of slowed down pretty hard when COVID hit. I was I was a fireman still. So work was very, very busy. Lots of overtime matches were obviously kind of shut down. So kind of slowed down a little bit. But yeah, so my history’s probably got a good 15 years of shooting Three Gun really competitively and really actively.

It’s led me to being involved in the industry during that time. It’s led me to meeting quite a few people who are either manufacturers, builders, or designers. I’ve gotten a hell of an education as far as being able to talk to people and learn things, learn how all the equipment works, learn how it’s built, learn what makes good, bad.

Otherwise. And through all of those associations, I’ve been exposed to a lot of products, been exposed to a lot of the latest greatest and a lot of the not-so-latest greatest. And so I’m now at a point where I’ve got, I feel like I’ve got, a pretty good breadth and depth of information to be able to kind of judge something on, and here we are.

Craig: During the time that I was shooting very actively, I was, you know, there was the sport was, was incredibly active. There were a lot of good shooters. I was definitely considered one of those guys who was able to win a national-level championship or, or win a national-level match. At the very least, I shot for several years.

I was an inaugural member with Three Gun Nation Pro series, shot for several years in the pro series. I, I feel that I was very fortunate in that I was I was able to shoot with a lot of the original great shooters of Three Gun Mike Voight, Jerry Miculek, Jack Bruce, Pilot Benny Cooley, multiple people, Patrick Kelly. There have been so many of these guys who are very instrumental in building that whole system and they were great shooters and I was always very interested I always you know, I loved going to dinner and being able to talk about how they practiced, how they how they trained, what they saw in to match, how they you know, everything about how they did things. And it made me a lot better. I was I was able to get better very quickly and build a good set of foundational skills and was able to win a few of those matches, even against guys who were who are of that caliber. So, yeah, I feel like I, you know, I’m a solid shooter.

I tend to maybe be I, I don’t want to give myself credit for being humble about it, but I tend to not be that type of person that was that out of proportion. But I also know that I’ve got a really solid skill set shooting.

Craig: So the sport of Three Gun has never had a long-term organization supervising Three Gun and has never had a real ranking system. We’ve had different organizations come in and take over. So there’s a lot of ways that people can judge how good you are, how good you’re not. I don’t feel like I want to want to brag about my skill set or anything like that, because there’s there’s a lot of great shooters out there and there’s a lot of really skilled shooters out there.

When I look back, I’m pretty proud of being able to know that I can finish with those shooters all the time, whether it’s a top ten position, top five position at a national level event, and occasionally even winning a national level event with, you know, one of the ones I’m very proud of was was a Western regional four three Gun Nation Pro series and was able to be Mike, Mike Voight and Jerry Miculek at the same match.

So those are those are two guys who almost anybody can look at and and say they were the best at their craft. And I had a good weekend and shot really well and was able to come away from a win against that caliber shooter. So I’m proud of my skill set. I’ve worked hard to build a good skill set and I’ve been able to prove that that skill set solid.

And it’s fun to get back shooting now after a couple of years off and realize kind of how far that skill set erodes with time off and get back to work.

Craig: So yeah, a few years ago, I’ve always had a relationship with Desert Tech. And a few years ago Nick Young called me and asked me to come down and take a look at something they were working on. And as I said, I’ve been around Desert Tech for a long time, and I had talked to Nick for several years, and he had always been very adamant that he wasn’t going to make an AR-15 type product.

And so when he called me and said, "Come take a look at something", the last thing that I thought that I was coming to take a look at was, was anything AR related. I walked into the conference room and one of these was sitting there and it was obvious immediately what it was. It’s it’s a double width or quad-stack AR-15 mag.

And it’s not the first attempt at something like this, but it’s very obvious that it’s a very different attempt at increasing the capacity in an AR-15. So I looked at it and initially there wasn’t a receiver anywhere near the table. So I looked at the mag, I kind of looked at Nick because I was kind of thinking, you know, what the hell is this?

You said you’re never going to do anything AR-15 related. And here this is obviously AR-15 related.

Read the next part of this interview PART 2

When will the Quattro-15 be available?
Development History: Quattro-15 & QMAG-53
Behind the Scenes testing the QMAG-53