He lived in wheat farming country and would shoot “varmits” (ground hogs) which eat wheat. It was considered a beneficial activity.

Anyway Loyd knew I was an animal lover so he filled juice bottles with water and red food coloring and taped photocopies of groundhogs to them. At 300 yards they erupted with a spray of red, clearly showing we hit our target. Much easier than using the spotting scope to find a hole in a paper target. I never considered the aquagophers “creepy”.

Marksman is generally used to refer to an highly skilled or expert “shooter”, a term I’m comfortable with.

Though you might want to think about applying the term “shooter” to yourself. We’re old enough to remember when the proper terms were “marksman” and “sports hunter”. But “shooter” is the standard term in news accounts for a serial killer who uses a gun. And I’m pretty sure the term has its origins in the “first-person shooter” video games–simulated mass murder.

The widespread use of the term “shooter” is symptomatic of the high levels of violence, paranoia, fear, and militarization (“toy soldier” pathology) grafted on to what I agree was, once upon a time, something that could be called a “sport” with a straight face. But today? The NRA and its allies have turned your benign sport into probably the single most toxic political issue in the country.

So to a degree I do blame you and your fellow gun enthusiasts for buying into the NRA’s poisonous rhetoric. Once upon a time I’d have urged you guys to start a rival organization, but jeez, somebody did that and we got Gun Owners of America, founded because the NRA just wasn’t extreme enough. Lord, what kind of hell do you have to inhabit when Wayne La Pierre is not extreme enough for you?

I think there’s room to dispute whether some things should properly be considered “fun”. That article you linked to in turn linked to an online catalog for a company making targets, and some of their offerings were a bit creepy. Next to the traditional human silhouette were pictures of brightly-colored “self-healing jumping jacks” and cartoonish animal figures, in other words toys that were explicitly designed to attract the attention of children. Some of those targets are designed to bounce around the landscape at random, I guess like a running rabbit, encouraging “shooters” to start spraying bullets around while automatically trying to track that thing jumping around the landscape.

Kid shooters, being trained to shoot up toys and in the unmistakable message that guns too are toys.

Is teaching kids that guns are toys really consistent with that vaunted “responsible gun ownership” we hear so much about, but see so little of?

Ask that poor little nine year old girl whether guns are toys. Someday she may even be able to answer you.

It appears to me that shooters have been vilified because of the events of the past few years. I totally understand that and can respect the reactions. I’ve had some of the same reactions myself.

But Robert, what you don’t seem to understand is, shooters see guns as things of beauty, craftsmanship, and marvels of engineering and history. Shooting appeals to the kid in all of us. The power of the recoil, the crack of the report, the working of the action, the smell of powder and the hole in the target are all part of the appeal. And because of this incident we are supposed to be ashamed of ourselves?

You have no concept of use of firearms other than that of self defense, and tend to disavow them for that purpose as well.

I don’t see why fun and responsibility are mutually exclusive. Sorry if not everyone has given up childish things.

They are a truly conscienceless organization. They exploit racial conflict, fear of crime, paranoia, and reactionary politics to stimulate a demand for more, and increasingly lethal firearms, while simultaneously promoting policies which will make military grade firepower available to criminals as well.

They protect the gun industry with propaganda, lobbying, and legislative extortion. Long ago, they morphed from an organization serving gun owners and sportsmen to a corporate shill promoting the interests of the gun industry.

Their sole purpose is to maintain and increase the demand, market, sales and profits of the merchants of death. They are simply no damned good, and I have no use for them, or those who support them. Whether or not guns are intrinsically good or bad has nothing to do with it.

BTW, the article wasn’t very reassuring. The examples they give of “fun” targets are basically kid’s toys, the message being, shoot up your toys because guns are toys. Jacks, animal figures, exploding targets that make fun loud noises, everything brightly-colored to attract the infantile eye…nothing sick there, oh no.

Isn’t the message that shooting should be fun for kids just a bit at odds with so-called “responsible gun ownership”? Are they really necessary tools of self-defense, or are guns just toys for children of all ages?

So it stands to reason, the more sane and responsible gun owners there are, the more assholes you will encounter. And of course, its the assholes you hear about. As I try to point out in my post “statistically speaking” below, the instructor at this range was probably very competent and conscientious. But the more people you have engaged in this kind of activity the more likely this sort of accident will be to occur. If you sell more cars with big motors, more people are going to drive faster, and more people will have crashes, and the more innocents will die needlessly.

All countries have unfortunate shootings, by crime or accident. The reason they are a such huge problem here, as opposed to most other countries, is that there are so many guns and so many shooters here. It isn’t something that happens occasionally, in another town. Its something that happens all the time, everywhere.

And the reason we have so many guns and shooters is…well, you tell me. I’ll give you a hint. Go to your local newsstand and look over the “tactical firearms” magazines, what I like to call “gun porn.” I don’t mean the traditional journals written for hunters and sportsmen, I mean the stuff designed to cater to the GI Joes among us. I don’t care how sane and responsible most of them are, a certain percentage is going to be really messed up psychologically, and a certain percentage will have accidents, and a certain percentage will have their guns stolen from them.. And no matter how small that percentage is, when multiplied by the total number of guns out there, and the total number of targets they have available, you have a problem. This hobby affects people who don’t follow it.

I don’t think this is carried in the DNA, this is a social problem-a form of “American Exceptionalism”; it is taught, nobody is born that way. And if social problems can be encouraged for private profit and manipulated for political indoctrination, then they can certainly be controlled for the public safety.