Gold!
Does anybody know who Kim Rhode
is? In 1996 at the Olympics, this 17
year old girl won gold! She became the
youngest female Gold medalist in the history of Olympic shooting. In 2008 she added her 4th Olympic metal to
her tally in women’s skeet.
Shooting has some of the broadest age range of participants of any sport
including historically, one Swedish shooter who was 73 years old when he
competed!
But we are talking about the
The USA Shooting Team is historically
one of the top shooting teams in the world. In total, U.S. Shooters have won 97
Olympic medals and out of the top-ten American Olympic Medalists of all time,
three are shooters. Further, shooting as a sport ranks third in total Olympic
Medals won by the
I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my
shoulder that I never saw shooting on the TV during the Olympics and so I
decided I wasn’t going to watch much of the coverage long ago. But this year I was quite surprise to see
that the NBC website did have video that you could download of some of the
competitions. So, I became interested
again. I even watched a few events when
I could get the kids away from Sponge Bob on the TV. Somebody told me that there was a tiny bit of
trapshooting coverage on prime time, so congrats NBC.
But unfortunately, this nation of
shooters is currently NOT in the lead in the shooting metal counts, we are
trailing behind China, Czech Republic, and Italy after 8 events as of this
writing (out of 15) so there may still be hope.
I’m a bit disappointed in our
efforts. I hate to think that the
communists can out shoot us though it possible that the communists might be
better at motivating their participants than the free world. (Remember when the East German women's
athletes would FAIL a sex test. I don’t
know how desperate you or your country has to be to either agree or be forced
to change your SEX in order to try and win medals for the fatherland).
SO, it was kind of refreshing to
open my shotgun news this week and read Freds article. If you don’t get shotgun news or know who I’m
talking about, you can see it online at www.fredsm14stocks.com. He had a neat little test printed on his
page. A 1 inch square in black ink. A simple test to see
Are You A RIFLEMAN or
a COOK?
It’s a simple test really. Take this page out to the range or where ever
you can find a place to shoot. Take any
rifle you happen to have. You might want
to photo copy it several times incase your are
humiliated by your own efforts so you can repeat it.
Fred’s standard is that A rifleman can
hit this box from 82 feet EVERY TIME from a Prone position and at least 2 times
standing and 3 or 4 from the sitting position.
Well, that challenge on the page was
too much for this shooter and so I did just that though I used a marker to make
6 squares on a sheet of paper instead of a photo copier which I didn’t have
access to this evening.
The first square I used to adjusted my
sights as I was zeroed for a longer distance.
Then I took the plunge. It was
mixed results. From sitting, I kept all
five shots on target (Rifleman for sure….) then from prone I missed it twice
(cook…). Standing and shooting I hit it
twice (rifleman again…) and I did hit it five times leaning up against a tree (which
was not part of Freds challenge).
Being a cook is Fred’s way of pointing
out that when the going gets tough, the nation will need riflemen and those who
don’t pass muster will end up being the chow cooks, safe behind the front lines
while the real men go off to fight. and defend the nation
like the boys did in the revolutionary war.
Who is Fred by the way? He is a businessman who writes an interesting
article in the shotgun news each month, sometimes a sad commentary on the
status of this great nation, and sometimes a call to wake you up and get you
thinking. His current mission is to
teach people some of the forgotten history of our founding fathers and the
sacrifices they went through to create this nation. Its worth reading
sometime, you will be quite surprised if you do. Look up a little history of April 19th,1775 at Northbridge.