By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
It’s all about kids today as the anti-gun crowd gears up for the long haul.
Actually, they’ve been at it for a long time. However, the organization of high school students into a mass movement promoting gun control is a relatively new development with deep pocket anti-gunners bankrolling flights to Washington, DC, and school administrators and teachers organizing well publicized student marches.
Students from Tri-City United High School stand for the Pledge of Allegiance early in the morning on June 15, 2018, before beginning to compete in the annual trap shooting championship in Alexandria, MN, reported in the illustrated Time article. (Photo by Sarah Blesener for TIME)
The same people have been campaigning for a long time to raise a couple of generations with a total anti-gun philosophy. I can remember when one of my grandson’s suburban school teachers expressed public dismay that he had been out in the country shooting with his dad—a police officer at the time—and his grandfather had taken him along on a target shooting event.
The anti-gun educators have been slowly building a new culture, and politicians have been getting into the act as well, suggesting as they have in New York State that all shooting sports, including archery, be banned from all of the state’s schools.
Their agenda ignores the valuable life lessons about safety, concentration, body control and courtesy learned by those who engage in the shooting sports at an early age. Years ago, it was common for high schools and colleges to have regular shooting ranges, programs and teams.
The cost of building and maintaining safe ranges that can accommodate modern ammunition was one factor, but that was generally resolved by switching to airguns. Fortunately, through the Junior ROTC programs and the 30 or so colleges that still maintain NCAA shooting programs, the US can still field competitive Olympic teams. However, every once and a while there is talk about reducing further or eliminating shooting games from the international Olympics,
It’s all about how the anti-gunners would rebuild a culture in their image from the ground up, viewing it as the ultimate path for eradication of the Second Amendment.
Given this state of affairs, it was heartening to have Time magazine’s March 7 edition report so glowingly about a scholastic trap shooting program.
“Pop. Pop. Pop. At the Minnesota high school trap-shooting championship, more than 8,000 students from some 300 schools gathered in June to blast flying orange discs out of the sky. Over nine days, the sound of bullets firing—hour after hour after hour—-becomes ambient noise, like a supermarket soundtrack. Pop. Pop. Pop.,” the Time story by Sean Gregory began.
“RVs filled the parking lot. Sponsor tents (the US Army, Friends of NRA, a guy selling Donald Trump T-shirts) lined the Alexandria Shooting Park, a grassy stretch in a lake-dotted region around two hours northwest of Minneapolis. Kids in their team uniforms formed a rainbow of red, orange, green, maroon, all shades of blue. Their shirts bore the names of their scholastic trap-shooting squads and the local outfits that support them. For Crosslake Community School, the list includes a local bank, an insurance broker, the American Legion and Grandpa’s General Store,” the report continued.
The lengthy Time report quoted briefly here continued by saying the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League championship bills itself as the largest shooting sports event in the world. “With the bustling crowds and flood of corporate interest, it could be mistaken for, say, a scene on the NASCAR circuit, except that the stars are teenage boys and girls. And they’re armed. That’s the entire point.”
“In much of the country, the words guns and schools do tend to go together more often in horrific headlines than under a senior portrait, wedged between Class Treasurer and Spring Track,” the article continued in a more traditional media approach to the issue.
The Times article continued by noting that “more and more yearbooks are marking competitive shooting as a part of high school life. Even as mass shootings have inspired protests and walkouts in many schools, a growing number—-sometimes the same schools—are sanctioning shooting squads as an extracurricular activity. In 2015, for example, 9,245 students, in 317 schools across three states, participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. Since then, participation has spiked 137%: in 2018, 21,917 students, from 804 teams in 20 states—-including New York and California, as well as Texas—competed.”
It mentioned, perhaps in response to the sponsor of the New York legislation, that no scientific research shows that joining a shooting team makes you more likely to do harm with a gun. And there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence, at least among shooting teams, that describes such structured activities as an antidote to the afflictions often attributed to students who have carried out school massacres, including alienation and social isolation.
It’s an individual sport, like wrestling, that also offers the bonding and interdependence of a team. There are no cheerleaders, though, and performance is the measure.
By and large, however, Time deserves plaudits for seeing a good side of guns…and kids.
