Take an adult shooting for the first time
One of the best thing you can do for the hobby, sport, and lifestyle that is being an active gun owner is to, quite literally, make friends. Moreover, what better activity is there than being there for someone who is just learning to shoot?
Why?
I’m glad you asked.
Ever heard of Roque?
It was sport that was amazingly popular in the late 1890s and early 20th century in the U.S. Basically a chopped up version of croquet, it was invented right here in the states and used rules borrowed from billiards and golf. An Olympic sport at the 1904 games it was for a time the third most popular sport in the country after baseball and football. If you asked someone in 1904 if roque would be forgotten in a century, they would have laughed into their boating hat.
Alas roque…we hardly knew ye,
Today roque is practically extinct. In 2004, the American Roque and Croquet Association suspended tournaments because the number of participants at the Nationals had shrunk to single figures. Why? Those who were interested in it just didn’t pass it on to their kids, friends and neighbors in a way that they wanted to continue. Then, once those old-school roque fans died out, the sport gasped its last breath with them.
While yes, arguably firearms, personal defensive gun use, and the shooting sports are much more well-known than roque, gun owners and users who are active in the culture are a small enough segment of the population that if we don’t pass on our tribal knowledge to others, when we are gone who is left to ensure that by 2114 the various gun owners associations around right now don’t suspend shooting matches or annual meetings because the number of participants wouldn’t fill up a double table at Applebee’s?
Read the rest in my column at Firearms talk.
