Where have all the shooters gone?

[peepsight]

Hi

Even Germany reports a decline in the numbers taking up shooting and this is a country with over 3,000,000 registered target shooters. In the UK we have had governments and media who are basically anti shooting.
If a sport does not involve chasing a ball or running round a track, the media don't want to know. Yet ironically, the British media will devote hours of air time to international darts matches which is basically a target sport.

Its a different situation in Scandinavia, shooting in Norway is almost the national sport as it is in Finland. Big matches are covered by the networks which brings this honourable sport to the masses which in turn generates interest. Switzerland is another country where shooting is a way of life.

There are thousands of shooters in all countries that just pull triggers but very few that are dedicated enough to get in to their national and/or Olympic disciplines seriously.

As many other posts have said, kids have many more things these days to spend their money on or take part in.

[mikeschroeder]

Hi

A problem that several posts have touched on is that in America, kids who are either good at a sport, or have parents who REALLY WANT them to be, effectively turn PRO. For American baseball, basketball and football, this takes place at about 2nd grade. Wichita KS has several baseball leagues. a couple are NON-COMPETITIVE, which also means that there's no coaching, no decent fields etc. The competitive teams play in a spring league, a summer league, take August off, and have a fall league, then they have batting practice at indoor batting cages two or three times a month from November until March. If you want to play a sport well enough for it to be fun, you play year round until you get burned out. Unfortunately, many of the kids who burn out never take up another sport. The prevailing thought seems to be that unless I'm good enough to turn pro, it's not worth doing. My son hasn't touched a ball glove since he didn't make the high school team freshman year.

I don't know where I found the quote "I love to watch the seasons change, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey." For today's youth, the seasons don't change.

I help out with 4H shooting, we get two types of kids in shooting, the 4Her's who will do ANY 4H activity for long enough to get credit, and the kids who weren't good enough to play regularly in the ball games. We keep about half of each group in the long team.

Positives are that in Shotgun and Pistol we can teach the basics in three classes or less, then the kids spend time just shooting. It means that we could effectively take in new kids every three weeks. Rifle takes a lot longer to teach since we teach 4 positions.

Mike
Wichita KS

[Mako]

My boy loves shooting! ... but only in his video games. :-(

[jhmartin]

While I "coach" 4-H rifle and pistol .... I primarily focus on rifle ... sorry pistol folks, I just enjoy the rifle better .... it is sort of like left brainers & right brainers, Windows people and Mac people ... they are different....

So .... in terms of rifle. I truely believe that there is no inherent talent required for this sport ... at least not a physical one like for baseball, football, soccer, basketball and such. In rifle there is concentration, practice, and the ability to focus.

It does take me a few months to get an air rifle shooter "competent" in the positions (I'm a 3-Position program), after that, while we do adjustments to the positions, I see the most gain in working on the items mentioned above. And that it seems can easily take a few years.

A shooter learning the sport in his/her junior year of high school, unless they have gained the concentration and focus skills somewhere else, will have to "endure" sophomore's beating them in matches for a while until their practice skills catch up ... and that will take pulling the trigger probably thousands of times at "good" shots ..... not just flinging lead. If they happen to never have learned or not worked on the concentration and focusing on one task to the exclusion of others, I would not be suprised at a loss of interest. There I have to work at making it fun somehow.... It's hard to be 17 or 18 and get your clock cleaned by a 10 or 11 year old that has been shooting for 2-3 years already.

The more I learn, the more I see the need to get these kids shooting younger and younger. I think the JROTC/high school programs would benefit greatly to open their programs to mid-schoolers. In that respect the clubs and 4-H programs could potentially have an advantage over the JROTC/high school programs. Look at the Corvette City program in KY ... one of their shooters, a 13 year old, wiped the floor at the American Legion Nationals this year in sporter

Ramble, ramble, ramble, I know..... just start them young! Nothing wrong with competition ... as long as kids are "in the mix", they have a much greater chance of sticking with it ... when they are outclassed, that's where we lose them (???)

[Questor]

Here I am! I'm a shooter who started shooting at age 40. Part of the reason is that I live within a reasonable distance from five ranges. If it were not so convenient I wouldn't do it. I live along the outskirts of a big metropolitan area. Most of the millions of people who live there have too much travel and hassles to endure to go shooting. Indoor ranges are really loud and sometimes crowded. It's just not pleasant.

Another obstacle is the high cost of entry. By the time you've got a decent gun, a spotting scope, and the other accoutrements needed for minimal target shooting, you've spent over $1000.

[Ted]

I coach a high school rotc unit. I coach an air rifle rogram and an air pistol program.This past summer the Army rotc director put out a bulletin that all air pistol programs are to decease. The marine rotc units just recently put out a directive to stop air pistol programs too. Why the military doesn't want to have markmanship with an air pistol taught to its cadets/potential soldiers is beyond me. They still let air rifle be a sport taught in their units though. This obviously is nickel and diming the potential pool of international shooters away. So, to answer the question of what is happening to all the shooters, politics is one significant factor in their disappearance.

[Mako]

At the Marksmanship Range at the City of Industry, Los Angeles ... they have a kids program with 22 rifles ... but kids under 18 aren't allowed to handle even air pistols.

[Roy Hill]

I coach a collegiate club air rifle team.

I have a group of five dedicated shooters.

Not one of them had ever participated in competitive shooting until I recruited them onto the team.

At least three of them had never fired a single shot out of any sort of gun at all until I recruited them to the team.

I'm not bragging.

I'm just saying that in the face of declining shooter numbers, we can:

A)throw up our hands and moan "what's to be done?"

B) get out there and try to do something about the situation.

While I've got only five, that's five more than existed a couple of years ago.

In addition to the five on the team right now, I've had numerous others come to the team and leave due to graduation, getting a job, etc.

We also operate in the spring semester an air rifle intramural program, which will be in its second year this April.

Instead of quietly going into that good night, I choose to fight.

[isuguncoach]

A simple question to everyone writing to this thread, or all of you reading this thread. What are you doing to involve more junior shooters?

How many involved with the shooting sports in its many forms, help with NRA shooting camps, volunteer at a junior club, invite the neighbors and their kids for a fun shoot at your range?

So many shooters wring their hands at the lack of young people getting started in the sport, but don't do anything to get more people started. This is not "somebodies" issue, it is OUR issue.

I'm in Illinois, and everyone knows what we're fighting against from the Chicago influence. A group of us (a very small group) and started to do something. Started an air rifle club and grew one shooter at a time.

Last Saturday we held a 4th annual Classic air rifle match and had 71 shooters from across Illinois. We can introduce families and youth to the shooting sports, but all of us need to help is some way.

If your club or range doesn't have a junior program, start talking about getting one going. If your club does have a junior program, step up and help them in some way. Whether it is money for equipment, donating old equipment you don't use, or time to teach a junior.

I have only been coaching for 9 years, but am so tired of this discussion of what do we do with no young shooters. If we all ACTED instead of just talked and wrote emails, we can change this trend. One junior at a time, then one community, then one city, then one county, and then one State.

It has to start with some one, why can't it start with YOU.


Joe

www.cipshooters.org

[Shooter]

A very good topic. One thing that we have done here in Oregon is we finally was able to have some air gun shooting at the state fair this year. This is a 10-day event at the end of Aug. in the capitol city, Salem. We had some bb-gun shooting through the National Guard many years ago, but for some reason it was stopped. The Fish & Game dept. took over running the fair this year and have it as a state park now. Perhaps they wanted to have some shooting going on as a lead in to hunter safety course requirements. I don't know, but I was glad to see it and to work part of the event. We had a large white tent area, with one end for the walk-up public and the other end for match shooting. We held the Oregon state championship in rifle and pistol during the fair. Both precision and sporter guns were used with quite a good turnout. The SASS folks had one day of demo for Cowboy Action as well, that went over great. Lots of smoke and noise. On the public end, we had well over 4.000 people shoot at least some during the 10 days. Everyone got something, plus all questions about where to shoot, more about the sport, etc were handled. We had lots of paperwork to hand out to people and everyone went away with something. The fair management said that our area and one other were to two most popular areas of the fair. Shows how popular the shooting sports are if people can just be exposed to it. How about some of you working on your county and state fair people to get some kind of air gun shooting going on.
Good shooting, Don in Oregon.

[corning]

Junior shooters? I haven't drawn any of them into the shooting sports, but I did draw my son-in-law back into the sport. I have let him use equipment (which I would do for others too) and subsidized his match fees, and some ammo (depending on what we shoot). If and when he and our daughter grace us with grandchild(ren), I will be looking for and becoming actively involved in some sort of junior program.

John

[Still shoot´n...]

Foregive mee, but I could not resist this one:

--- "The answer is quite simple there are very few young pistol shooters (below the age of 30) and mostly old foofs. (!)

What the heck is a "FOOF", anyway? Any young foofs around at the ranges? No? The young FOOFS are busy sitting in their (parents) couches waching televisison, ya said?

And this one from "TomN":

Last shooter, please turn out the lights.

Well, couldnt we start by turning out the telly (more often), and spend more time at the local indoor range?
I do.

[Still shoot´n...]

Foregive mee, but I could not resist this one:

--- "The answer is quite simple there are very few young pistol shooters (below the age of 30) and mostly old foofs. (!)

What the heck is a "FOOF", anyway? Any young foofs around at the ranges? No? The young FOOFS are busy sitting in their (parents) couches waching televisison, ya said?

And this one from "TomN":

Last shooter, please turn out the lights.

Well, couldnt we start by turning out the telly (more often), and spend more time at the local indoor range?
I do.

[guester]

Can someone explain the expression "Foof", please?

English language is not my mothertongue, so I do not understand that expression.

[Mike Taylor]

In the context of the message, "foof" would be a more polite substitution for "fart". That is, "old foofs" would be a substitution for "old farts". The latter phrase being a disparaging term for old men of grumpy disposition and unfriendly demeanor - at least as seen by the younger generation.
Mike T.

[plinker]

Well, I'm still a smallbore shooter and I'm still here. . .unfortunately, the range is gone. We had a good range too! It was big, and we frequently hosted large regional smallbore matches, ROTC units, casual shooters, and also had a very active Jr program.

Then, I went off to college. By the time I returned to my hometown (Dallas), the city boomed and all the land area around the range was being bought up by real estate investors. The range got regulated out of existance by the encroachment of the city development. The pistol club, which was a separate entity from the rifle club, acquired some land outside of town and re-established itself. I have no other explanation for the rifle club except that they completely dropped the ball and we lost our range.

I thought that I would be able to find another place to shoot, but that has not been the case. Since I was a smallbore position shooter it was difficult to locate a range which didn't have permanent bench rests built on the firing line. I tried squeezing between these to do a little prone shooting, but it didn't work so well.

Most of the rifle shooting is highpower and mostly hunters sighting in their guns before the season starts or a new gun owner with a big boomer that you wouldn't want to have going off next to you when you are precision shooting.

State and Regional Championships (.22 prone and 3 position) around Dallas/FtWorth are now non-existant. I've been told there is a range in Terrell, Tx that might be OK, but there are only a few firing points to that range, and it's a long drive for me to get there. They do host a few club shoots, so I might try to go to a few of those, but I am still disappointed that my old home range is gone.

I don't know what the solution will ultimately be, except that I believe that there are still a lot of people out there who want to learn to shoot and I'm going to do my best to help them. I am currently involved with a women's shooting group that puts on a bi-annual "Learn to Shoot" day for any women that are interested, and that every year the people signed up gets bigger, so I know the interest is there. We just need to get out there and promote it.

[Bpbrinson]

e-mail me Plinker, we ahve a international pistol program at Dallas Pistol club, but have some interest for the future. We want to expand but have to have intrest to make the modifcations to the range for you guys. My wife is one of the air rifle shooters.

Brooks
bpbrinson(at)tx.rr(dot)com
214-735-7066

[plinker]

Thanks Bpb, I'll do that.

Is that the old Dallas Pistol and Revolver Club that used to be on Luna Road? If so, ya'll are the pistol club I was talking about. My dad was a member and a good competitive shooter there for many years.

I was a member of the old Trinity Rifle Club (next door neighbor to the pistol range). I still have my old range badge from the range in my gun box. Still miss the old place. I drove by the old location on Luna a few months ago and noticed the land was back up for sale again - there's still too much development around for the re-establishment of the old club, but it was a trip down Nostalgia (Luna) Road for me!

[TomN]

It's nice to see that this topic has some legs! Thanks to all who have posted it.

Plinker, et. al., seem to have reached the nub of the problem: It's had to shoot when one has no place to shoot. It's all well and good to say, "Go out and recruit a shooter!" but without a range, where do you bring the recruits? Even if we limit the discussion to air rifles/pistols, trying to find space in a public building to practice marksmanship is (at least in my area) a non-starter.

For what it's worth, I would be interested in knowing how others have handled this. Has anyone been able to secure "new" space in a public building for marksmanship? Also, in this era of $3.00+ gasoline, how far are folks traveling to train? My own home range is 55 minutes away from house.

[Mike M.]

Frankly, that's where AP comes in. You can shoot AP just about anywhere. It may not be as macho as blasting away with 1911s, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Finding space ina public building? Depends on the area. Some areas will go into full-blown hysterics. Others...well, if you can bring your own pellet traps AND a larger backstop (canvas on a hanger should do the trick, I think), I see no reason why you could not get an Olympic Sports program organized.