Category: Shooting

It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself. This begs some questions:

1. How do you expect to have police that know how to shoot when you’ve done everything possible to extinguish any kind of responsible shooting culture in your city?
2. How many police officers do you think learn to shoot because they interact heavily in the civilian gun culture by taking part in competitions, belonging to shooting clubs, and generally shooting for recreation?
3. NRA has an entire division dedicated to law enforcement training. Have you ever considered inviting them to New York?
4. Law enforcement is a profession that tends to run in families. Indeed, a good many gun bloggers come from law enforcement families. Part of that is indoctrinating the next generation in the ways of the gun. If there is no civilian gun culture, how are the martial arts of this profession going to be passed down?
5. What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.

There will probably be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. Some will undoubtedly want to disarm police officers. Cooler heads will call for more training. More training would obviously be a good thing, but the best thing for New York would be a restoration of a responsible civilian gun culture where police officers can find means to hone their skills recreationally, where there’s a body of knowledge and competence from which to draw from, and where there are places to shoot and plenty of people practiced in the art of shooting, from whom much can be learned. In other words, allow New York to be more like the rest of America, and you might find that suddenly your officers can reliably hit a target from yards away without having to expend a magazine and seriously injure innocent bystanders.

UPDATE: I guess we’ll see how some folks in Idaho stack up in the LAPD combat course.

Let me just get this out of the way first: there is no circumstance where handling guns while intoxicated is a good idea. But Caleb speaks of whether drinking the night before a match has a detrimental effect on performance. I haven’t been going to matches for about a year now, but when I was shooting Silhouette one or two times a week, I developed some experience with this topic — have a cookout with copious amounts of beer and liquor Saturday night, and at the butt crack of dawn Sunday, you’re out on the range.

Metallic Silhouette is not a run-and-gun game, but precision shooting, in my case with a semi-auto pistol (which of course have no sporting use). I tend to think shooting after having been drinking to excess the night before is highly detrimental to your game. For one, you’re unsteady. For two, your involuntary muscle movements are more erratic. I had difficulty hitting any of the animals, and I’d get impatient and fire when I really shouldn’t have.

That said, I’ve found the worst thing for my performance, even worse than drinking the night before, is showing up to a match having not eaten anything. When I’ve done that, I’ve noticed marked improvement in my scores after the match broke for lunch. I’ve shot an A score in the morning only to turn around and get in a Master score after lunch. I tend to agree with Caleb, that it’s best to follow your normal routine. But I’d add if your normal routine is skipping breakfast, which mine is, I’ve found that it’s important to have a bite before getting on the range.

Now to further this line of discussion, what do you think the effect of caffeine is? I’ve never found it to affect me all that much, but others think it does.

A lot of gun owners seem to be reacting to this like some kind of gotcha against Bloomberg. I think it’s correct and proper for the NYPD to do this:

But on Wednesday Mayor Bloomberg’s position on gun control looked shakier as it was revealed that his police department, the NYPD, had sold 28,000lbs of spent bullet casings to a store which reloads them and sells them cheaply to customers.

I think that’s fine. We ought to be defending this practice, and not trying to use it as a club to beat Bloomberg over the head. It saves the NYPD money, helps keep the cases from being melted down and sold for scrap (at less economic value) and shooters get cheap, reloaded ammunition. I’ll give New York City and Bloomberg credit when they do something right.

Of course, I’ll leave it to your amusement that the Telegraph doesn’t know the difference between a bullet and a casing.

According to gold medal-winner Vince Hancock, he believes that more people are taking the shooting sports seriously here in the U.S.:

So why is the U.S. so dominant in the sport over the last several years?

“I really think it’s because we want it more. And we’ve been bringing the youth along with us,” Hancock said. …

Hancock said the elite American shooters set a standard that brings up the competitive level of all shooters. “I’ve been shooting high scores for eight or nine years now. When I first started out, a 192 out of 200 in a local competition would win it. Now, it’s barely making the final,” he said.

“With Kim and I shooting these extremely high scores, it’s making everyone else shoot harder, and be more proficient and hit more targets. And that’s making us shoot even harder. Kim and I know that if we slip up, we’re going to lose.”

He also had a message that will hopefully convince some more folks to give shooting a try:

“There is nothing dangerous about what we do here, at any level. The biggest thing that we preach is safety first.”

Hancock believes shooting is one of the safest sports for competitors of any responsible age.

“I always tell a joke out there that we have less injuries than table tennis,” he said.

And if you think his outreach for the sport doesn’t help win us a few more hearts and (eventually, hopefully, minds), then you’re wrong:

Sometimes, that message is as simple as exposure to the sport. Hancock recalled one journalist about five years ago whose opinion was quickly altered after a day on the range.

“She was extremely anti-gun. But I talked her into trying it,” he said. “And once she hit some targets, you couldn’t take her off the field.”

We’re winning. We just need to keep up the work to expose more people to the positive aspects of gun ownership. We need to keep showing them why the gun range is a cool place to be instead of the non-existent and far less cool “anti-gun range.”

The Wall Street Journal sent a guy who had never shot a gun before out to try his hand at skeet and trap with Olympians Corey Cogdell and Frank Thompson. I love that they explain what the sports involve, along with a reminder about safety and addressing a common fear with shooting shotguns – recoil.

Men who shoot trap, we have a lot of those here in the U.S. But, did you know that we don’t have a single American male competing in the Olympic trap competition?

I do realize that the Olympic competition is different from the traditional American version played at clubs around the country, but it seems like we should be able to field some dude from somewhere across this great land in the sport. Anyone want to try for 2016? Come on, it’s in Rio de Janeiro.

We do have two competitors in double trap (including the very attractive Pennsylvania native Josh Richmond). In skeet, we also have two competitors.

When I tried to check out the streaming coverage of the Olympics this morning, I found that I couldn’t watch it without “logging in” via my cable provider. Well, we don’t have cable.

However, the actual Olympics website has a cool feature for shooting sports coverage. They feature the targets of the winners during the final rounds. Take a look at the difference between first place and last place in the first medal event of the entire Games – Women’s 10m Air Rifle. For even the best shooters who read this blog, the “last” place target would be incredible on their best days. For an Olympic shooter, it’s pretty easy to see the shot that made this a an eighth place target.

UPDATE: Want to know more about exactly how these targets are scored? Olympian Jamie Gray answered a question about it from the comments! From her comment:

All the scoring is done electronically. So instead of shooting at a paper taget with scoring rings you shoot at a black dot. There is black paper (black rubber in Smallbore) that advances every shot. There are microphones that read the sound of the shot hitting the paper to calculate where the shot actually hit the target. The shot then appears on a monitor that is next to the shooter. These targets are very accurate. The qualification rounds are scored in full value, so you can shoot a 10,9,8,7…the score needed to make the final in this Olympics was 397. That is missing the pencil dot hole in the center of the target no more than 3 times. The final is scored in tenths of points, where the best shot is a 10.9. So the rings are broken into tenths, 10.9, 10.8, 10.7…10.0, 9.9…this is all scored electronically as well.

Wow. That makes me feel a bit like a loser for finding silhouette hard to shoot. Regardless, it’s all the more reason to be amazed by what our athletes do over there.

In this event, there were no 10.9s shot. However, there were five 10.8s. The interesting thing about it is that three of those nearly perfect shots were shot by the silver medalist. However, when the “lowest” shot from the woman who won gold was a 10.0, you can see why she won the gold.

We thank Jamie Gray, a native of Lebanon, PA, for stopping by in the comments. Good luck in the Women’s 50m Rifle event on the 4th!

Wall Street Journal highlights how surprisingly common it is for Olympic athletes to lose their medals. Of the athletes they interviewed, many report that their medals were stolen; though a few cited circumstances that may have been a bit more in their control. There are two shooters mentioned in the story:

Some Olympians don’t like talking about their absent-minded moment. Glenn Eller, a shotgun shooter who won gold in Beijing, says only that someone took it while he was out with colleagues in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 2008. “I put myself in a situation that I probably shouldn’t have been in, and someone stole it out of my pocket,” he says. “I’m trying to forget it and go ahead.” He has since received a replica. …

Corey Codgell, a shotgun shooter who won bronze in Beijing, doesn’t take any chances. She usually keeps her nicked-up medal in her front pocket when she travels. Before letting an audience at an event handle it, she warns everybody: “No one leaves this room until I get my medal back.”

On a slightly related note, Pennsylvania is represented on this year’s shooting team by Jamie Gray and Joshua Richmond.

I also continue to be amazed by the number of Olympic shooters from states that aren’t exactly known for being gun friendly or having a strong gun culture – California has three shooters while Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey each have one Olympian with ties to the state.

When competitive shooters like Jesse Duff are on morning TV shows, we’ve made it.