Posted on 03/14/2015 6:58:28 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away.
They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn’t on TV.
“Which is strange because I’m from Texas,” said Nick McCoy, wearing a T-shirt advertising his dorm and getting ready to shoot.
McCoy is one of the brainiacs on MIT’s pistol and rifle teams, which, like other college shooting teams, have benefited from the largesse of gun industry money and become so popular that they often turn students away. Teams are thriving at a diverse range of schools: Yale, Harvard, the University of Maryland, George Mason University, and even smaller schools such as Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and Connors State College in Oklahoma.
“We literally have way more students interested than we can handle,” said Steve Goldstein, one of MIT’s pistol coaches.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I believe MIT has had a shooting club since more or less the year it was founded.
It definitely had one in the 1970s.
There’s a radio talk show host about age 65, grew up in Queens:
He has memories of TAKING THE SUBWAY with is .22 rifle..!
And there was a shooting team at his high-school.
I HAD A SHOOTING CLUB IN MY HIGH SCHOOL. I think this GREAT!!!!!
Same here. Plus took the bus into DC to the NRA range with my rifle back in the day.
Hmmm... A reasonably fair, and at times almost positive article about guns and shooting from the Washington Post can only mean one thing... The entire staff of senior editors must be down with the flue. I can see no other explanation for how this got printed.
There was still one at MIT in 1999 when I visited it and the man in charge was, if I recall correctly, former US Marine.
Did you have a shooting RANGE in your high school? We did.
As a kid riding the bus, me and my older brother brought his .22lr Remington Rifle for Rifle Club and I got to carry the box of bullets ... I was in fifth grade and he was in seventh. Bus driver never even blinked when we boarded the School Bus ... in 1950. A SWAT team would probably gun us down now adays.
If they’re down the flue, let’s hope they never come up.
My Brother took his .22 Rifle to High School back in the late 50’s. He was in the School Shooting Club. There was a Range in the Basement of the School.
We lived on Long Island, New York.
My local college had one of the top women’s rifle teams in the 50s. I used to help a local instructor with Boy Scout gun safety courses on their range. Full of gun grabbing libs now.
Due to the gun industry’s largesse!? WTF are they talking about? Did something radically change in collegiate shooting funding? I certainly don’t remember any gun industry money when I was shooting in college and my team went to the NCAA championships every year.
When I was in fourth and fifth grade, I used to take a city bus downtown to the YMCA almost every day. There was a shooting range in the basement of the “Y”, and usually there would be one or two boys in the back of the bus carrying rifles. My recollection is that they were in cases.
No one seemed to think anything of it. I went into the range to watch them shoot, which was OK with the instructor as long as I stayed behind a line on the floor. They had ear protectors, but no one made you use them. I thought it was cool. I don’t recall the thought of one of them turning the gun on me, or doing anything bad with their firearms at all, ever even occurring to me. It never even crossed my mind to think that I was in any danger at all; they were all older boys, and I was sure they knew what they were doing.
And that “Y” had been there since before WWII, I’m pretty sure.
This was in Syracuse, NY.
I took my daughter shooting shotgun for the first time last December. She loved it. The range has a youth club (trap, skeet, sporting clays) that gets a lot of support from the industry. She joined and shoots free (100 birds) and four free boxes of shells supplied by various manufacturers.
Sort of like the drug dealers giving out free samples to the kids. And yes, she is addicted to shooting now!
Yes. In the basement of the school. And 50% of the guys INCLUDING TEACHERS TOOK off on opening day of deer season.
It is Zen, and Zen archers understood this for centuries before gunpowder arrived in Japan. Like Zen meditation, it involves focus, shedding of distraction, and the shooter emerges relaxed and refreshed. You don't need to be Annie Oakley for that to happen.
That's fine for target shooting. You really don't want to be in that state in a tactical situation because you need to pay attention to more than just the target. But target shooting time is meditation time, at least for me.
The kids over at MIT have had a shooting club since Methuselah was in diapers.
And they’re darn good, too.
Countless awards.
Utterly false to pretend it’s a new phenomenon.
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