I love a bit of good news.

Minnesota youth trap shooting explodes — with help from the NRA

On opening day of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League championship, the Alexandria Shooting Park sounds like a very loud batch of popcorn. Squads of five teammates, lined up in a row, fire shotguns at blaze-orange discs streaking across the sky. “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop! Pop! Pop!” The nine-day event, which has more than 8,000 competitors, is billed as the largest trap-shooting tournament in the country.

Clay-target shooting, a longtime Olympic sport, includes four disciplines, of which trap is most popular. Though it’s an individual sport, shooting in teams has a social aspect. “It’s like golf only louder,” says John Nelson, who oversees the tournament as president of the Eagan-based USA Clay Target League and its Minnesota chapter.

USA Clay Target League is the largest youth clay-target shooting organization in the country, with more than 46,000 members in grades 6-12. Roughly 12,000 of those participants are in Minnesota, which has teams in about 350 of its 500 or so high schools. (Football, the state’s largest high-school sport, has around 20,000 participants; boys and girls hockey has 8,000)

In just two decades, clay target has become one of the country’s fastest-growing high-school sports. And Minnesota is, arguably, the epicenter of youth trap’s nationwide boom.

Students say they develop skills and friendships through the sport. But they aren’t the only ones benefitting from the league’s explosive growth. Retailers sell more firearms and ammunition (league participants go through 350,000 cases annually) — and conservation groups get a cut of the tax on those purchases.

More controversially, the National Rifle Association stands to bolster its ranks with youth trap shooters by donating millions to the sport, unnerving advocates of gun-violence prevention.

The league gave schools the playbook for bringing together students, coaches, a gun club, safety certification, and insurance. It also facilitated “virtual” competitions (teams shoot independently at gun clubs and compare scores). “Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport,” Nelson said. “We want kids to letter. We want kids to be recognized in the yearbook.”

Minnesota became the first state to have its high school league endorse clay-target shooting, which lent the sport credibility among wary school administrators. “If you go in and say, ‘I have a program that’s gonna involve kids and guns and schools,’ you get a lot of doors closed on you,” Nelson recalled.

John Nelson, president of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League, said ”Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport.”John Nelson, president of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League, said ”Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport.”

The kids are enjoying trap shooting.

They are outside, playing a sport, an Olympic sport, building skills and making friends.

They are learning gun safety and responsible sportsmanship.

This exactly what youth sports are all about.

I really hope more states develop programs like this.

This is how we win, by demonstrating to the next generation that the shooting sports are fun and safe.

I saw this on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Dead_like_you/status/1669949884101787649?s=19

Allow me to explain.

You will see ranges like this in the Midwest.

They are public municipal ranges on land managed by a law enforcement agency like Fish & Game, or in this case, the Department of Natural Resources.

The bureaucracy hates the range but for various legal reasons, can’t shut it down.

Instead, they make the range inconvenient to use, with capricious rules.

They don’t want people to shoot here, so they geared it towards hunters who might shoot a few rounds to zero their hunting rifle for the season then leave.

So yes, it’s a Fudd range, run by Fudd bureaucracy.

If you have been doing competitive shooting for certain amount of time, you find out soon enough that other than 1911 magazines, the shooting accessory that fails the most is the cheap gun range bag. I went through 3 of them till I decided to forego bullcrap and invest in a Competitive Edge Dynamics range bag which has stood the test of time and my mishandling.

The great thing about the bag is that you can pack a lot of stuff you may need for a long day of shooting at a remote range. It is comforting to reach inside and either bring out your pistol, the mags, ammo, country ham sandwich, suntan spray, bug spray, emergency poncho, gunsmith tools or anything else you need.

But, the bad thing is that as you get old and you just want to do a quick trip to the local range to practice, that is a humongous thing to carry around. Smaller range bags tend to be built cheaply and you end up wasting money again, but it was the wife that came up with the great solution of getting me my first tool tote when I got into “tactical” rifle with my AKlon.

Plain old tool carriers you can buy at your local Big Box hardware store, not too expensive and overbuilt to withstand mistreatment by almost anybody.

I have acquired a couple of extra items in the same vein, including a small tool bag for simple and quick trips to the local range.

The Husky bag a top of the CED range bag carried my Eye and Ear protection, a couple hundred rounds of 9mm, spare mags for the PC9 plus 8×8 targets and tape. I went to the range without looking like a packing mule and got my shooting done in comfort. They come in different sizes priced between $15 to $25 IRRC.

OK, I am outta here. I must go out with the missus.

I saw Miguel’s post on this, and I thought I’d give my perspective.

Biden: “Down in Philadelphia and New York, areas I know well, like up here, you’d see a truck pull up, pull to the curb and selling weapons, selling guns, selling AR-15s.”

pic.twitter.com/KDdt1ViFlR

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 16, 2023

If you know anything about Leftist rhetorical tactics, you know they try to make arguments by conflating two things.

For example:

They will say something about how “immigrants actually commit crimes at a rate lower than native born Americans” and then go on to defend illegal immigrants.

It’s misdirection by conflating.

It’s true that legal immigrants who entered America on visas and with background checks do commit crimes at a lower rate than legal immigrants.  Our system selects good people, and the legal immigrants know that if they break the law, they will be deported.

Illegal immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native born Americans. Arguably, a rate of 100% if you count the initial act of illegally crossing the border to begin with.

The Left knows this, but can only “win” their argument defending illegal immigrants by conflating crime statistics about legal and illegal immigration.

In the gun world, for decades, the Left talked a out the “gun show loophole.”

They would conflate a dealer with a booth who had to run NICS checks on buyers, with the lone private citizen who was selling one personally owned gun. Thats not a loophole, thats the law. They can’t be honest and explain that or their fear mongering falls flat.

So what is Biden talking about here.

I used to live outside of Chicago. Chicago has a terrible problem with illegal guns.

You cannot own a gun in Illinois without a permit called a FOID. So how do all those criminals without permits get guns?

The black market. There are guys who deal in illegal goods, guns and drugs most frequently.

Their two major sources of illegal guns are guns stolen from people’s homes (lock up your guns), or straw purchases from dows state or out of state.

So yes, you can buy a gun in Chicago from the trunk of a car.

That guy is a criminal, he’s always been a criminal, and the biggest problem is that those guys rarely were every prosecuted adequately for illegal arms trafficking.

So here is Biden conflating fences and black marketeers with FFL dealers.

I don’t know if it’s because he’s a senile old man with pudding for brains, he’s a Leftist lying by conflation the way Leftist do, or both.

Duane Owen (Was/Were) was executed for the murder of Georgianna Worden, a 38-year-old executive secretary and mother of two. He was also given the death penalty for the brutal rape and murder of 14-year-old Karen Slattery who was first stabbed all over her body 18 times and then sexually abused.

ACLU trying to be woke, keeps cementing the idea that all LGBQT+&%$, etc. are just a bunch of murdering sexual deviates who we are supposed to commiserate because they were not given a penis slicing and titties courtesy of the taxpayers.

But we are the bigots.

Then again maybe the ACLU is following the example of school boards that refuse to arm teachers or even harden schools to protect children. You get successful fundraisers and more funding if you get to wave the bloody shirt.

There are days when your socks are knocked off. Is it accidental journalisming or is this common place for them?

It is even more confusing when the call sign is “KPQ”. For those that don’t know, radio call signs start with “W” east of the Mississippi and with a “K” to the west. Generally a “K” call sign translates to “Oh My God, they said what!”

Can You Legally Carry A Firearm In Public In Washington?—Dave Bernstein, Can You Legally Carry A Firearm in Public In Washington?, News Radio 560 KPQ, (last visited Jun. 17, 2023) I’m cringing already.

Where’s the catch?

Come on, where is the zinger? Where is the slam of conservatives and gun owners? What’s WRONG with you?

That’s the extent of their reporting. Clean, clear, short. The rest of the article is a table of states and the legal state of open and concealed carry in those states. Nothing untoward.

Feel free to give them a click and positive feedback.

A small warning. When a state has open carry but concealed is permitted, shitty cops will sometimes claim that having any part of your arm covered is actually “concealed”. That means that if you are wearing an OWB holster and your shirt tail covers a part of the grip, you could be charged with concealed carry without a permit.

In the same way, but reverse, some cops will claim that if your concealed firearm prints or is observed it is “open carry”. If the stated doesn’t allow open carry you are in for a bad day.

I am all up for buying a nice AR from the back of a truck like it was tamales.

Biden: “Down in Philadelphia and New York, areas I know well, like up here, you’d see a truck pull up, pull to the curb and selling weapons, selling guns, selling AR-15s.”

pic.twitter.com/KDdt1ViFlR

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 16, 2023