Rapid fire pistol at the Olympics

The early Games had a few variants of the event:

• 1896: The event featured "muzzle-loading" pistols, which were required to be of .45 caliber. The distance was 25 metres, the current standard. As with other 1896 events, a multiplicative scoring system was used. Timing is unknown.[2][3]
• 1900: This event was limited to professionals (a significant departure from the general amateurism principles of the time). Only six shots were fired per shooter. The pistols used are sometimes described as "military" pistols. Timing is unknown. Distance was 20 metres.
• 1912: This was a "dueling pistols" event. The timing in this event involved single shots rather than true rapid fire, but the target would appear for only 3 seconds for each shot. A full silhouette target was used. Distance was 30 metres. Hits, rather than score, was used as the first criterion for ranking shooters; only those tied on hits were sorted by score.[4][5][6]
• 1920: Like 1900, this is sometimes identified as a "military" pistols event. The distance was 30 metres. Shooters fired 30 shots each, with targets that had scoring circles up to 10 points apiece. Shooters had the option of using their team event score or shooting again for the individual match.
• 1924–1936: These three Games used variations on a hit-or-miss theme. Shots were fired in series of 6 shots, each at 6 targets. The score for the series was how many targets were hit; there were no scoring rings. The initial round used 3 series (maximum score 18), while successive rounds of 1 series each were used to narrow the field from those who scored perfectly. In 1924, the first round had the targets available for 10 seconds, with all later rounds being 8 seconds; for the other two Games, the first round was 8 seconds and the later rounds got faster each round, down to 2 seconds in the fifth round.