- My name is Reed Evans, and I am the state 4-H
shooting sports director. And today we'll be discussing
the air rifle discipline. And today I have Mr. Jeff Hendricks. He's a level-two
certified rifle instructor from Lowndes County. So, Jeff, take it away. - All right. Here at 4-H, we stress
firearm safety, okay. So first thing everyone needs
is a pair of safety glasses. They can be plastic safety glasses, or they can be your actual eyeglasses as long as they have a
shatterproof rating on 'em. Al
so on the guns, you see this green flag. That is a safety breech indicator indicating that nothing is in
that barrel but that string. So if we ever had a gun that
didn't fire all the way, discharge the pellet all the way out, you wouldn't be able to
get the string in there, and we'd know that gun
has something in it, and we'd address that. So here in 4-H, we start off junior ones. Junior ones shoot sometimes five meter. This is a five-meter BB gun. It is scoped. You can shoot scope, or you can s
hoot the other
gun, which has open sights. Or we can shoot five-meter peep sights. Some of these guns don't
have the peeps on them. I've put 'em on the other guns. But you can get with somebody, and they can put peep sights on there. This is a 10-meter sporter rifle here. It shoots a little bit more
faster and shoots pellets only. These two both shoot BBs or pellets. One of the things is the sporter
rifle limit on it is $650, these rifles, $100 limit. So depending on how much
you wanna get invol
ved, you can get in at the base
level with $100 rifle. Now in 4-H, we have junior ones, which is eight and nine-year-olds, and they shoot with
sandbag or block of wood or rifle rest at the front, have one point of contact on the table with the front of the gun. They have to be tall enough to kick the buttstock up off the table so that way the kid's not
laying down on the table and letting the table guide the gun. - One point of contact. - One point of contact only. Now in 4-H, we shoot .177 cali
ber pellets. We get our pellets from
Daisy and other places, but we had to have flathead-only pellets, no hardened pellets, no semi-hollow point pellets
of any kind like that. When we're shooting at our targets, we have our 10-meter target here. And on this target in the middle here, these are our sighter targets. So we have a loading tray that we use to follow our our target, and
we have two for the sighters. We'll load shots in each one, shoot, and adjust our sights if we need to. When we're r
eady to shoot, we'll flip this loading tray over, load one per bullseye,
and we have 10 shots. We have 10 minutes to fire those 10 shots, one minute per bullseye. You shoot 'em all. On the five meter, little bit different. Our sighters are on the
bottom in the middle there. Still the same thing. We load and fire at each one. Adjust our sights if necessary. And then we have a loading
tray that has the 10 holes, and you pull the pellet out. When you're shooting at this target, it's gonna be on car
dboard, and sometimes the pellet or the BB doesn't punch
you all the way through, so you may need a pair of binoculars so you can look down range and see because sometimes you won't be
able to tell if you shot it. But that's the purpose
of this loading tray, is when you pull a pellet out of the hole, you know you shot at that
target, and you need to move on. So, our junior three starts at 12, and junior threes shoot
prone, kneeling and standing. Same as senior-age kids. For that, we have a sleep
ing bag mat, or you can use a rifle bag
to roll it out on the ground. But this keeps you up off the dirt. And if you're shooting kneeling, you have a towel roll you
can put underneath your ankle in the back, what helps keep some of the pressure off the top of your foot. And so the other position
we shoot is three position. So on the senior-age kids and
junior one, two, and three, they can have a sling
that we put right here on the front of this
rifle rest, rifle arm. And you can wear that sling
doing sitting or kneeling and prone only, no sling
during standing position, so. - All right.
- About all I got. You wanna continue? - All right, so another thing I wanted to mention was be familiar
with your event handbook. So this is all for the... What we're discussing today is for the district event, of course, but be familiar with your event handbook. It changes from year to year, and I'm talking to our
parents, coaches, volunteers. Everybody need to read
through this thoroughly for whateve
r discipline
your child is competing in. But be familiar with that. You can find it on our extension website, or you can contact your
county extension agent, and they can actually order
hard copies from campus, and you can get your hands
on a hard copy of it as well. But remember, our main goal in
4-H is to train champion kids and not champion shooters.
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