Dave51
I’m curious what is needed to keep a club supplied? I didn’t know these clubs exist; how many are there? They shoot flintlocks or modern inline rifles? Are there scheduled events? Nice thing to be able to dedicate your time to.
There's 4H and Scouts. In the case of 4H, they don't recognize any Instructor cert but their own. However, some clubs do quite a bit of shooting BUT generally, a Scout camp will see far more kids. Camps differ but they all recognize the NRA/NMLRA Instructor cert.
So keeping a club supplied, that depends on what they're doing, how much shooting, and how many kids. In our case dealing with Scouts, we shoot everything from PRB to Minies so we use #11s, musket caps, Scheutzen 3f and lots of lead. The key here is to get involved and help the existing programs improve and by that, get more kids wanting to come shoot. When our method is compared to the conventional stuff, kids invariably want to shoot with us. The key is to publicize and get known. Case in point, there's a camp fairly near me that has a decent program. However, the program is divided into 1hr slots each day with a limited number of kids per hour. Think a standard school type of schedule. How much do you think you're going to get done in one hour per day with the kids? Next, that same program sticks with only PRB. The kids load at a loading table, carry the rifle to the line where they sit down and shoot from sandbags. How much marksmanship do you really think gets taught?
Contrast that with what we do, and granted, ours is instructor intensive and we can only work with a number of kids based on our instructor numbers. We start with a safety brief, a quick hands on history lesson and demonstrations, and then dive right into shooting and all shooting is offhand. The targets are all reactive and varying in difficulty so if the kids want to hit the more challenging targets, they'll have to absorb some of the marksmanship techniques we teach while they're having fun.
Cost for what we do, assuming the guns are available already, for 6 sessions of about 14 kids per session, is about $500 for the summer. I know some insist on the kids funding this but this is in a Scout camp setting. They're already paying to be in the camp and the camp helps to defray the costs.
Bottom line is if you don't get involved, the decline will only continue and folks will come here and complain about it while doing nothing. Like I've heard it said, "we have met the enemy and they is us"
