In 1871, a former Union officer, Col. William C. Church, wrote a series of articles in a United States Army and Navy magazine. He was acting as a watchman sounding a clear call for training in marksmanship. Col. Church quoted another veteran officer who complained, “The general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our soldiers during the Civil War appalled me.”
Col. Church went on to propose that an association be formed “to promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis….”
On November 17, 1871, the organization known today as the National Rifle Association of America was formed in order to answer that need. With notable exceptions the Southern soldiers were much more adept at sharpshooting during the War Between the States and this had become a matter of great concern. The reason for the disparity in shooting skills seems to have been because the Northerners were urban dwellers and Southerners tended to be farmers and mountain people that lived in rural areas so the Southerners were more familiar with the handling of firearms and many more Southerners than Northerners supplemented their diets by hunting for wild game.
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, thus beginning a legislative agenda that eventually led to creation of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship. The purpose of these legislative initiatives was, “That every facility should be offered citizens outside of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and organized militia [National Guard] to become proficient in rifle shooting, and that this purpose can best be accomplished by means of rifle clubs.”
Pres. Roosevelt, an avid shooter, thought that it was necessary for the nation’s defense to provide rifles and facilities for civilians to develop good shooting skills via competition and other programs. This philosophy continued up until fairly modern times. Then the concepts of mutual assured destruction and other modern military theories combined to convince leaders in the United States government and the Armed Forces that small arms have very little relevancy to modern warfare.
MAD, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, became the underlying premise in many areas of official United States policy. The international structure for limiting nuclear arms by means of treaties (SALT Treaty, etc.) with the Soviets was super-power parity in which the parties agreed that each side in the super-power struggle would forfeit the right of deploying Antiballistic Missiles (ABMs).
In other words, the US leadership under Nixon and Kissinger agreed not to use missiles to protect the US population from our enemy’s missiles in order to hold each other’s populations hostage to a nuclear strike; i.e., we abdicated defense of the civilian populations by forfeiting our defensive posture against nuclear attack while theoretically ensuring our ability to destroy the Soviet populace by a retaliatory strike. Most of us never understood this because of the complicated bureaucratese that grew up around the professional apparatus surrounding such a diabolical arrangement.
(Continued)
Does it make any difference to our national security whether or not civilians learn how to shoot before enlisting in the United States Armed Forces?
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http://www.nrahq.org/education/training/find.asp
If you know someone open to the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (particularly the open minded who haven't yet gotten their own) please point them at that course locater. There are a lot of good commercial schools too, but nothing serves as a better (high quality and low cost) introduction then NRA basic courses. -Boyd NRA TC EVC and EKCFoNRA volunteer
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03/20/08 @ 14:04 Permalink
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