Most people who are involved in the shooting sports focus on one or two areas that interest them the most. Hunters pay attention to the gear they need to harvest various game, precision shooters fine tune their guns to place their shots on the bullseye at extreme distances, cowboy action shooters study the history of guns used in the Old West, and so on.
What I do is teach people the bare basics of safety and marksmanship, with the end result hopefully being that someone can defend themselves from the majority of violent criminal attacks. Those who focus on their own personal self defense skills probably can outshoot me any day of the week, but I doubt that there are many instructors out there that can match my ability to find solutions for new shooters who are also disabled or elderly.
Firearms are the best personal protection devices ever invented, and those with reduced physical abilities are the most vulnerable. No one will be able to enjoy, well, anything unless they are first alive and free from threat. That is why I think that what I do is probably the most important of all the shooting sports.
Does that make me arrogant? I'll let you decide.
Most of the shooting sports available today are relatively new activities. Fifty years ago hunting dominated any discussion of firearms or civilian gun ownership. The number of people involved in hunting various game dwarfed those interested in precision rifle marksmanship, handguns, or buying and trading military surplus arms.
Cowboy action shooting, the IDPA, and other organizations that emphasized skills suitable for surviving an armed encounter generally didn't exist. The sole exception was the faint beginnings of what would eventually become IPSC, but it was poorly organized and rather hit-or-miss until 1976.
This is the environment where most of the old school shooters spent their formative years. If you were a hunter you were at the cutting edge of civilian firearm technology and trends. If your interests ran to any other shooting sport then the best that could be said was that you were one of those "fringe elements".
This has thankfully changed. The number of people involved in the non-hunting shooting sports has grown, even while the number of hunters has regretfully shrunk. Is hunting still very influential so far as firearm manufacturers and the gun owning community is concerned? Sure, and that is just as it should be. But I really doubt that anyone can reasonably claim that the sport of hunting is the most important, or the most influential.
An example of this is the whole Jim Zumbo affair. While many people have claimed that he is a hugely popular and influential gunwriter, I had never heard of him before last week. This is understandable since I have been focusing on self defense while he was writing about hunting, but it also points up the changing landscape so far as the shooting sports are concerned. I didn't need to read hunting magazines to keep abreast of developments that were important to me and my students.
Michael Bane has posted some thoughts about the aftermath of the Zumbo affair. He says that the hunting community got a big wake up call, and then he goes on to call for solidarity instead of seizing the opportunity to punish the hunters for their arrogance and contempt.
I think that this isn't going to happen unless the hunters actually start to act a bit more responsibly.
Comments (1)
Bear in mind, please, that not all nor probably even most hunters are like Zumbo. Many, many hunters own more than just their "bambi-zappers" and fully understand the Second Amendment.
There is a large contingent of those we call "Fudds," however, and they are not limited to hunters. There are benchrest-Fudds, sporting-clays Fudds, and CAS-Fudds as well. They all share one attitude: "What I have is OK. What you have is unnecessary." Particularly if what you have is black, ugly, and military-like.
And that's got to cease.
Posted by Kevin Baker | February 26, 2007 7:54 PM
Posted on February 26, 2007 19:54