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Sport Shooting: We Owe It All To The Civil War

by chiron99

We all know about the important role that guns play in American
recreation. Consider such facts as the profusion of hunting
magazines available on any newsstand; the huge number of duck
blinds that can be seen in any woods; the fact that every town
and hamlet has its driving range; the size and power of the NRA
(National Rifle Association); or the wide availability of
gun-safety classes to American youth. And that's not even
mentioning the prominence of the pro-gun and pro-hunting lobbies
in American politics - which is more visible than a five-point
buck standing twenty yards away in broad daylight.

Given this prominence, it's not surprising that sport shooting
is a major American competitive sport with a significant Olympic
presence - it accounts for fifty-one medals in ten men's and
seven women's events.

What may be surprising, however, is the origin of the sport, and
its roots in American history. The idea of practice and target
shooting as a pastime began in the period after the Civil War - a
war in which, as it turns out, poor marksmanship was widespread.
Two Union Army officers were bothered enough by this dearth of
good marksmen among the citizen-soldiers of the War Between the
States that they founded, in 1871, the National Rifle Association
to promote gun skill, safety and awareness. Soon after, the pair
of NRA founders - William C. Church and George Wingate, a colonel
and a general respectively - opened a major rifle range for
civilian shooters in upstate New York (the Creemor Range).

Due in large part to the efforts of Church and Wingate,
rifle-shooting competitions grew so popular that a larger range
had to be constructed to hold them. College and university rifle
clubs followed soon after, as did youth programs. The million or
more American girls and boys who today take part in shooting
events through ROTC, JROTC, the 4-H, Boy Scouts, Jaycees, NCAA,
and other youth programs are the direct result of such
early-century efforts. The presence of the gun as a part of
American recreational life thus dates from, and is in part of a
result of, the Civil War, and of poor shooting therein.

The popularity of sport shooting owes something, too, to that
pop-culture phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the Wild West Show. Pioneered by "Buffalo Bill"
(William Cody), who was at least as good a self-promoter as he
was a cowboy, these festivals (which were as popular among
vacationing families of the day as, say, Disneyland would be to
us) brought the sharpshooting prowess of such figures as Annie
Oakley to the attention of thousands of Americans. Robert
Altman's movie Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) offers
contemporary audiences an entertaining, informative look at this
period in history, when the Wild West Show - part circus, part
rodeo, part county fair, and all theatre - helped to create the
mythology of the wild west while entertaining Americans from all
walks of life. And these shows, not incidentally, made trick
shooters like the aforementioned Ms. Oakley into role models for
young people.

Shooting events have been a part of the Olympics, too, since the
revival of the games in 1896. It probably didn't hurt that the
founder of the renewed Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, was a
shootist himself! According to tradition, the shooting medals are
the first to be awarded.

Shooting games can test for accuracy, speed, and both. There are
rifle events, which involve the ability to shoot a target at
great distances (up to twelve hundred yards in the case of
full-bore target shooting), and running target events, in which
the athlete must hit a moving target with great accuracy at
somewhat smaller distances. The biathlon, a Winter Olympics
sport, combines shooting with cross-country skiing. Some gun
owners participate in action shooting - a generic name for
several types of shooting in which a quick draw may be as
important as a good eye. You can shoot clay pigeons or skeet, or
shoot at a sequence of different birds in a game known as Five
Stand. There are handgun sports (modern pentathlon includes an
air-pistol event), shotgun-shooting events, and even -
intimidatingly enough - submachine gun competitions.

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