Wood Smoke

A few of the sports that I can see being popular  in the future are different types of competitive shooting.  There are many types of competitive  shooting in the world, one is long range shooting .    A different kind of shooting is trap or skeet which is done with a shotgun and clay pigeons. Another is cowboy action shooting or single action shooting  .These sports have a good chance of being a good promotion activity for people who want to learn to shoot.

This is a Barret .50 cal sniper rifle

One of the most amazing shooting sports is long range shooting.  This is done at over 1000 yards with big Boer rifles, firing “long for caliber” bullets.  One of the most common guns in this style of shooting is the .50 cal. BMG, this is the X  Canadian military sniper rifle cartridge.  Some other rifles are the  .308 Winchester and the .338 Lapua.  In this sport the competitors take turns shooting  at long ranges, at the end the person with the tightest group of holes, that is closest to the center wins. This is a hard thing to do because, at that distance the effect of mirage comes into play, and a target the size of a pie plate is very hard to hit when it moves. Last year my dad and I went to a gun show in Edmonton, and I saw a Barret .50cal long range rifle with matching bullets.  I was shocked to see that the shells were longer than a decimeter, and that the gun weighed almost 20lbs. This is just how big these rifles are.

Trap and skeet have been around for a long time. These sports  were originally used for field hunting practice in the sports early days, but has evolved into a thriving sport in the world. In trap, a clay pigeon is thrown from a machine and is shot by the competitor. In total, 25 clay pigeons are thrown. The person with the best average of hits wins.  In trap and skeet there are many different types of guns used though they are all shotguns, but there are different kinds of them.  On the stock on a shotgun designed for these sports, the chrome is higher, and the guns usually have very pretty wood work on them. Trap and skeet guns are usually double barreled shotguns to insure that a person dose not use to many shells in the gun.  For example if a person were to have a pump gun he could put up to 10 shells in the gun, this makes it a lot easier to cheat. On Sundays in the summer, the range south of Vermilion has a trap competition.  Sometimes my dad and I go and participate, it is pretty cool to watch the older people shoot.  They are extremely good at it. When I was in California I had the chance to go and shoot trap with a world champion trap shooter.  It was very cool, he showed me some things that I had never thought of. This sport has great potential because it is a accuracy and a speed game and it is very fun to play.

In the movies the wild west is brought back to us as history, but in a few places in Canada, they reenact these exciting events in real life. Cowboy action shooting, or single action shooting is a speed game, there are 5-10 stages that reenact different scenarios  of the wild west, they range from stage coach raids to poker disputes.  When you hear a beeper go off you may start your stage. The person with the fastest time wins.  This sounds very simple but it is a lot more complicated than that. there are certain types of guns that must be used, for example the minimum caliber your handgun can be is .32 cal. (Caliber is the diameter of the case in inches, so a .32 cal. is .32 inches in diameter).  When I was little I would go with my dad, my uncle and my cousin to a cowboy action shooting  range at Kelsey. This sport was entertaining to watch and even more entertaining to play this sport or so I was told, I never got the chance to play because I was to young.  In West Edmonton Mall  I went to a gun store called “Wild West” and met the world champion  shooter Ken Kupch I was very young and don’t remember much of it.  But this goes to show you that there are many people in this province that do these sports.

These sports have a good reason to go further because they are easy for people advertise.  Trap and skeet are already Olympic sports, the other two sports have great potential to go further.  If  T.V stations would promote them like they promote baseball and basketball they would have many more people in these sports.  But even if they don’t go any further they still  are challenging and fun to do.

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