What Happens When You Give a Harvard Student a Gun?

Well, you can find out this Saturday, when the Harvard Shooting Club hosts its latest shotgun skeet and trap shooting outing. Everyone—including you, even if you’ve never touched a gun before—is encouraged to attend. Need a reason? Here are a few offered by the club:

1. It's fun!

2. Prepare for a zombie apocalypse—shotgun experience will come in handy.

3. Meet awesome new people!

4. It's a chance to get off campus for a few hours.

5. Immense satisfaction in seeing the clay pigeon shatter into tiny pieces in every direction!

But...wait a second. If you’re like us, you may be a little alarmed (especially by this last reason). And you may be wondering just what “skeet and trap shooting” actually involves. Well, read on, because we’ve jumped the gun (ha!) and uncovered the answers for you after the jump.

Tian Wang ’11, co-president of the Harvard Shooting Club, gave us this explanation of skeet and trap shooting:

“The goal of skeet and trap shooting is to use a shotgun to hit clay pigeons thrown by an automatic thrower. In trap, shooters face a semicircular field and the pigeons are sent away from the shooter straight or angled toward the left or right. In skeet, shooters shift between seven positions on the semicircular field and targets are thrown to cross from a high house and a low house. Skeet is the more challenging of the two.”

Not being familiar with shooting as a sport, FlyBy’s first reaction was…well, unease. (In fact, the first gunshot in this video, from the outing's Facebook event page, made us jump a little.)

But about 60 percent of the people who have RSVP’d for the event so far are newbies, Wang told us, and free coaching will be provided. “Guns can, of course, be very dangerous, but part of the sport is learning proper safety techniques, so being afraid of the equipment shouldn't be a reason for missing out on this wonderful sport,” he said.

Wang added that the current reincarnation of the club (it was originally founded in 1883 but has been sporadically active and inactive in the years since) has not yet faced any anti-gun protests. In fact, he said, the club is “in the process of establishing a fund toward promoting firearm safety both on and outside of campus.”

That's good to know.  And we're relieved to find out that the Harvard Shooting Club isn’t full of gun-wielding crazies. Whew!

Still, this faint-hearted FlyBy correspondent is probably going to pass on the outing.  We'll leave the bullets and loud noises to braver souls.

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)