If a former bounty hunter gets his way, gun-fighting with Simunitions (a kind of non-lethal man-marker round generally used in force-on-force training) will become the next big thing:

Later this month, two guys plan to walk into a North Las Vegas bar and shoot each other.

The combatants will be wearing ballistics-grade head and body armor, carrying dinner plate-sized forearm shields and modified police-issue 9 mm Glocks.

They will be standing at opposite ends of a 30-by-8-foot steel cage — fully enclosed, UFC-style — in the middle of what used to be a couple of stage-side tabletops at Whiskey Dick’s, 2750 E. Craig Road.

That’s where a new sport, known to its North Las Vegas-based creators as tactical fast draw, is set to make its Jan. 31 debut.

“You’ll get two points for a head shot and one point for anything to the (body) vest,” fast draw inventor and former bounty hunter Nephi Oliva said. “You can score a maximum of 12 points, but there’s no time limit, so it’s almost like a boxing match with bullets.”

The article is a little light on details, but it appears that the combatants will be selected by the American Gunfighter Association (Oliva’s  fledgling sanctioning body), and not just any two guys in the bar that decide to shoot it out. That’s good, I guess, but I’m not buying Oliva’s claim that this is good for the shooting community.

But beneath it all, he said, fast draw is just an especially flashy way to teach people how to use a gun properly.

“Training for firearms is relatively boring,” Oliva said. “Ultimately, we are a firearms instruction company, and we offer training through sports to make it more appealing.

“People will ask, ‘Aren’t you promoting violence?’ My answer is that people like George Zimmerman existed because something like (fast draw) didn’t,” he said.

I’m sure all top trainers agree that the best way to learn proper gun handling is thought watching two other guys shoot each other while half-lit in a Vegas bar.

Right?