BB gun programs teach safety, shooting skills

A tin can or two, a backyard or patch of woods behind the house, and a lazy summer day. That’s the recipe for plinking with a BB gun.

This isn’t that.

Not exactly. There are targets, but they’re paper, with narrow gaps between scoring rings; the coveted 10-ring bullseye itself is only about 1/8-inch across, the width of a single BB. There are shooting ranges, but they’re official, measured, and controlled. And there are BB guns, but they’re Ferrari-like in their precision.

But there are kids, and fun, and learning, too. And that’s what makes this special.

Two Lebanon County sportsmen’s groups – Palmyra Sportsmen’s Association and Millcreek Rod and Gun Club – field BB gun teams that compete in the shooting education program sponsored by Daisy, the vaneless windmill maker turned air gun company. The 130-year-old company has offered education programs since the 1940s, with this particular program dating to 1966.

Teams – there are many across central Pennsylvania – are open to youngsters ages 8 to 15. Shooters square off in a season that goes from January through April, when Pennsylvania’s state tournament occurs. The three highest-finishing teams can go on to the Daisy National BB Gun Championship Match, commonly called the Daisy Nationals, near company headquarters in Rogers, Arkansas. This year’s event is July 10-13.

Millcreek is busy fundraising right now to support its A-team (the top shooters on each squad), which is headed to Rodgers after placing second at the state shoot, hosted this year by Palmyra. The squad finished fifth in the state last year.

“This year we’ve been on fire,” said Dan Long, Millcreek’s coach. “The kids have done fantastic. They’ve been very focused.”

That focus gets applied in two ways: safety and skill development.

At its core, the competitive program does two things, according to Daisy: it emphasizes gun safety while teaching youth shooters how to become more skilled marksmen and women.

“One distinctive feature of the Daisy Nationals is its commitment to education,” Daisy’s website reads. “Competitors must have completed the 10-hour Daisy Shooting Curriculum or similar classroom learning before beginning their shooting training. All Daisy Nationals competitors take a 50-question written test before the shooting starts at the match, and their test results are factored into their final score.”

That training is similar to, if a little less intense than, the hunter education class new hunters must complete in Pennsylvania, Long said.

“It teaches gun safety, marksmanship, proper gun handling, proper range rules, and operations, their dominant eye,” he noted. “It also teaches them how to make sight adjustments and score targets, and just regular competitive rules and etiquette.”

It’s that safety aspect of the program that really drives Frank Pulli, Palmyra’s BB gun coach for the last 46 years. His teams have had success, winning the Daisy Nationals in 2013. But it’s teaching young people how to responsibly handle firearms that matters most, he said.

“In the time I’ve done this, I’ve never had an accident with a child or a parent or anyone, and I’d like to keep a clean record,” he said. “Guns need to be handled safely. We need to teach the kids that and not shy away from it, which too many people do.

“It’s easy to for our kids to remember all the dos and don’ts when you’re inside the confines of the range. But when they go outside, when they walk out that door, I hope it stays with them at that point.”

As for the actual shooting, competitors typically use Daisy Avante Champion Model 499B guns. They’re the “gold standard,” Long said.

“They are competition ready pretty much straight out of the box,” he noted.

Each team consists of five primary shooters and two alternates, whose scores count if one of the original five can’t go. Shooters fire from four positions: standing, kneeling, prone, and sitting. Targets are 5 meters – a little more than 15 feet – away. The maximum score from each position is 100 points, for a total possible of 400.

It’s not uncommon to see shooters – new ones especially – make significant progress within a single season.

“Kids pick up shooting fairly quickly,” Long said. “We had three brand-new shooters this year and all have excelled.”

One girl improved her scores by 100 points from season’s start to end, for example.

“It’s just repetitive practice and proper positioning,” Long said. “It’s a lot for them to learn in one fell swoop. So it does take all the practices to work out all the kinks and get them into a proper routine of positioning. But then you can just watch their scores go up.”

Pulli loves to see young shooters get better, too, and he offers an incentive. Though he’s lactose intolerant, he allows his team’s most improved shooter at the end of the season to smear a cream pie in his face. He preps by putting cotton balls up his nose and in his ears and covers his hair with a silly hat and his clothes with a barber-like apron. But the kids love it, he said.

“I’ve tried bribing them not to do it,” he said. “I’ve gone up as high as $100. These kids don’t take it. They want to put the pie in my face.”

A lot of times, he can tell early in a season just who might improve enough to pie him.

“The team isn’t just a social club,” Pulli said. “Your goal is to shoot well at targets so you can beat other teams. You have to have patience. You have to listen to coaching. Maturity in a child helps. Which is discipline. They have to have discipline.

“The better shooters tend to be good students, too. But it can work both ways. Shooting can help kids with studying issues become better in school.”

The BB gun program is popular, here in the county and elsewhere, with 15 to 17 states typically sending teams to Nationals in any given year. Long, who shot for Myerstown back in the day, while his wife shot for Millcreek, just resurrected the program there three years ago. He’s already to the point of having to turn kids away each year for lack of space, though that’s something he and the club are looking to remedy.

Palmyra’s team, while smaller now, once had that issue, too, Pulli said. At its peak, it had 60 shooters.

Local teams have a big history at the Nationals. The now-defunct Myerstown team won three straight national titles in the mid-1990s. A team from Penn’s Valley near State College won the title three of the next five years.

It can be harder to find shooters today, Pulli said, since kids today have more options on how to spend their free time. But those who come out to shoot often stay. Some go on to compete with air rifles in other programs; some become hunters, too.

Along the way, the shooters – and many of the parents involved – really bond, said Long, whose 11-year-old son Matthew is on Millcreek’s A-team headed to Nationals (his 9-year-old daughter Laura is on Millcreek’s promising B-team). He was the only coach of Millcreek’s team when he started. Now, each practice before and between shoots is “more of a community.”

“Typically the parents and grandparents that bring the kids are our loaders, they make sight adjustments, that kind of thing,” he said. “That’s a huge contributor to our climbing scores. I call them all coaches, because that’s exactly what they are.

“It’s grown into more of a family and we help each other out when we need to. We all kind of chip in.”

They’re chipping in all the way to Arkansas this year. That’s a long way from the backyard, but the fun will be the same.