School Shooting Match

My son Alex is part of a high school school trap shooting team.  They had a match this morning near Rosalia, Washington, which was attented by several high school teams from around the region.  Trap is quite popular in Eastern WA, as this is one of the best places in the country for pheasant and quail hunting, to say nothing of the excellent duck and goose hunting opportunities.  From the shooting lines today, we saw several hundred geese in the air.


 



Above; No, it isn’t a crime scene or a network news story.  It depicts a fun event in which kids use guns and sharpen their skills on aerial targets, and so, by definition, it isn’t “news”.  The parking lot was packed with similar vehicles, open, loaded with guns and ammo.  Most people don’t bother to lock their vehicles, me included.



Above; an appropriately named school district.



Above; Alex in full target-busting mode.  That’s a decent hit– lots of small fragments.  If you hit one full-on, it disappears in a cloud of dust.  Scoring is the same either way.  If you break a little piece off the target, it’s a hit, same as a “duster”.



A great time was had by all.  Everyone was super nice.  There were decent facilities for those who wanted to stay warm and there was free coffee and decent food at very reasonable prices.  This locally operated club range was equipped with four trap houses, meaning 20 kids can be on the shooting line at one time.


I’d guess there were about 80 shooters attending and about 150 to 200 people there in total– Guns and ammo lying about everywhere, much like you’d find skis and poles sitting out on stands in front of a ski lodge.  Now if we were to take anything the anti gun-rights loons say with a shred of seriousness, we’d assume that all these kids would end up turning on each other in a bloddy shootout, as the stresses of competition became too much for them to handle, or something.  In fact, everyone was relaxed and friendly.  I will point out that, unlike a typical football game, there are no paramedics on standby at these events.  There would be no point in it.


Alex broke 26 of 50 targets, which isn’t bad, but a really good shooter would have hit 50 of 50.  Today there was some gusting wind, so even a really good shooter might have missed one or two because the targets were jumping around a bit in the wind.  If you’ve ever thrown a Frisbee in the wind you what know what I mean.  These clay targets fly a lot like little Frisbees.

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4 thoughts on “School Shooting Match

  1. That is really inspiring to read about.

    I went to school in a small community in the gold country foothills in Kalifornia. My brothers and I carried our .22 rifle to school once a week on the school bus and participated in the CMP sponsored shooting program. We were accompanied by at least twenty other boys and girls on that bus who also competed. In all there were around a hundred participants involved.

    Everyone was safety conscious and brought their own ammunition. As far as I can remember, no one killed anyone else or accidentally discharged their weapon. One of the boys later became a weapons trainer for . . . the US Secret Service. He didn’t kill anyone either.

    Ten years or so ago a friend who still lives near where I grew up sent me a newspaper clipping that tells the whole story on “scared liberals”. A fifteen year old was walking along a country road with a BB gun and was reported to the Sheriff’s office as “Man seen walking on street with high powered rifle”. (This area is extremely low density population). Of course the cops made a big deal of it and placed the kid in the back seat of the patrol car for 45 minutes. This resulted in even more panic by the idiots who made the call, SF Bay Area transplants.

    The fools who made the call did not know what a BB gun was!!

  2. Reality and perception are often so different as to have no resemblance to one another. Our challenge, and our plight, is that the loons are now in charge of protecting our rights in so many places, or to put it more precisely, they’re in charge of violating them.

    It shouldn’t have made any difference whether the kid in your account had been carrying a bouquet of flowers, a BB gun, a scoped .30-06, or a select fire AK. If he wasn’t threatening anyone or practicing unsafe handling he was doing no wrong. Likely the only crime was in the way the police handled the call.

    Police, each and every one of them individually, need to ask themselves; are they going to allow the inmates to control the asylum, or are they going to behave like adults.

  3. Another reason Trap is popular around the Palouse is the season – it’s a great sport for rural folks with winter wheat in the ground under snow cover – there’s a seasonal break with nothing to do on the land and in the barn no urgency is felt about machinery repair so go shoot Trap.

  4. Excellent posting. + Great photos. I especially like the image of guns n’ school buses.

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