Tom, it gets worse. Last year a culture-blogger found yearbook photos of the scores of high-school rifle teams that existed only 50 years ago–in New York City.

Note the excellent open-action discipline at Drexel.

–Thucydides

http://www.shorpy.com/node/5392?size=_original

February 10, 2008 was a Sunday; February 10th is on a Tuesday this year.

There are only about 50 colleges fielding NCAA rifle teams. There are only two national rifle clubs left–and I’ll bet no one reading this can name them.

Try working with the Boy Scout shooting program for a year, if you want to find out what your fellow citizens really think of you. Many private clubs have dropped their youth programs, ostensibly due to fear of liablity, but also the kids-off-my-lawn harumphing of senior club members.

ROTC dropped smallbore several years ago after the first-ever (in 125 years) scholastic rifle fatality: a gun-handling error. Competition heavily favors air rifle because the Euros are most of the way to banning gunpowder, the Olympics will follow suit, and the Germans make lots of money on air rifles (no American maker offers either a target .22 or an international air rifle). If you hope for a scholarship (about 3 per year per school, NCAA football rules) you’d better excel in both disciplines.

And yet, and yet, for all the big-bore handgun tactical head-for-the-hills gunblogging that goes on, I never ever see a mention of the collegiate sport, or the National Matches, or state conventional prone competition. And this is because? (Hint: cat herding) Nobody hates a shooter like another shooter.

Those are not high-power air rifles. A Quackenbush .457 is a high-power air rifle.

Thankfully, the Constitution (which I learned more about in JROTC than I did in any other course in high school) allows people to believe whatever they want, even if they’re delusional. As a smart guy once wrote: “You can’t handle the truth”.

1. The site claims that Chicago got rid of shooting in 1999. I wonder if they reinstated it.

2. One of the linked news articles quotes ”
Eduardo Ochoa teaches social justice at Lincoln High School in Chollas View. ” What’s up with that?

3. He says ““We teach our kids to think critically,” Ochoa says, “so as soon as my kids became conscious about a gun range on campus and other students being trained to shoot weapons, they started asking questions about the zero-tolerance policy. Since day one at this school, they’ve been told about there being no exception to having any weapons on campus, so they started making petitions and getting signatures from other students and staff members.”

a. I wonder if he’s more worried about the Zero-tolerance policy looking foolish than the shooting range being a bad thing. Too bad

b. Teenagers complaining about adult hypocrisy is not something the teachers are “teaching”, IMHO. They come by it naturally.

Faster and funnier. I swear.

My approach to preventing and/or thwarting another Columbine or Virginia Tech is having the ROTC Rifle Marksmanship Team be the schools Rapid Response Unit.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Once the shooting starts, you're either a combatant or a pop-up target. -- CBPelto]

Even though they say email is less effective, perhaps flooding email with support will be a good thing. In fact, here’s the email addr: board@sandi.net .

If it weren’t for military training there’d probably be a whole bunch of dead airline passengers and a lot more news coverage of something or other related to airplanes.

-m@

And the Discovery Channel.

Hysteria does NOT form a sound basis for education.