The Shooting Club: Reviving A Century-Old Tradition of Safe Sporting

At first look, Charles M. Jobin '01 and Caton M. Burwell '99 might be mistaken for models in an Eddie Bauer or J. Crew catalog--not the kind of guys who carry a shotgun on the weekends.

No faded flannel shirts or burly beards here.

Despite their clean-cut, preppy looks, the two are co-presidents of the Harvard Shooting Club, a 116-year-old organization that is seeing its membership increase after two years of dormancy.

The group now has 15 members and a newly launched Web site.

Still, Jobin and Burwell--who spent part of their childhoods on shooting outings with their families--say they have to explain to people that their club is not one for gun aficionados.

Instead, they say the club helps promote the sport of shooting, and they teach people how to do it safely.

"The point of the club is not to get together a bunch of people who love guns," Burwell says.

"It's pretty interesting that for such an intellectual, open, and enlightening institution such as Harvard...generally most people call it the gun club, and [that] has a negative connotation," Burwell adds.

A Hundred Years of History

It would seem as if the Shooting Club, which was founded in 1883, should have a wealth of history. But other than a book of shooting records, the club's history is obscured.

"I regret that, to my knowledge, there were never any records of the Harvard Shooting Club during the time I was connected with it," Richard Bullock, a member of the club in the 1800s, once wrote about the organization.

Bullock's words are now one of the few pieces of information saved at the Harvard Archives on the shooting Club. The small collection at the Archives also includes photographs, pamphlets, certificates, menus from club banquets and letters from the Shooting Club's earliest years.

According to information at the archives, the club had its own shooting range through the 1800s.

And during the early 1900s, club members had their own clay-pigeon trap near a swamp between Soldiers Field and the River.

During those times the Shooting Club competed against similar clubs at other Ivy League Schools. The club chose never to call itself the "shotgun team," though, because it did not want its acronym to the confused with that of the swimming team, according to a letter written by Nathaniel Nash '07, who was the club's captain in 1906.

During the mid-1900s, the Shooting Club may have had to compete with other clubs for members. Harvard then had clubs such as the Pistol Club and the Rifle and Pistol Club.

For a good time, records show the Shooting Club threw elaborate banquets. A menu from a banquet given for members of the club in 1887 showed that the expert shooters dined on patties of lobster, gloucester, croquettes of chicken auxpetits pois, spaghetti parmesan au gratin and banana fritters glace benedictine.

Safety First

But today, the focus of the club is not on promoting a sport reserved for the elite but instead on teaching people how to enjoy the sport of shooting safely.

Owning and using a gun in the state of Massachusetts at an institution like Harvard isn't easy, and members of the club encounter heavy regulations from both the state and the school.

For example, members of the shooting club are not allowed to keep guns in their rooms so they must store their shot-guns at the Harvard University Police Department.

State laws also require guns to have a trigger lack, and when traveling, the gun must be kept in a case.

Members say they have no qualms about following these rules and have written safety into their constitution.

All members must have a hunter's safety certificate or proof of having taken a safety course before firing any weapon, according to the club's constitution. And all members must exhibit a working knowledge of the firearm they are using and of firearm safety in general before they do any live firing.

Jobin says that if a member has a slight safety violation, "we have the right to terminate someone's membership."

"People generally expect us to be violent, backwards and abrasive," Burwell says, explaining that is not the case.

Educating the Masses

Burwell and Jobin hope to also use the club to promote a better understanding of the sport of shooting and the terminology behind it.

The co-presidents often have had to start from the basics when explaining what they do.

Despite the common perception, the Shooting Club uses shotguns, not rifles. A rifle's ammunition can travel up to three miles in distance, while the bead-size pellets of shotguns travel no more than 40 or 50 yards, according to Jobin.

Normally, the club shoots trap and skeet.

Trap is an event that involves shooting at flying clay pigeons, each four inches in diameter, from five adjacent stations. The clay pigeons are thrown from an underground bunker.

Skeet involves shooting at double clay targets, which are thrown at least 65 meters form a high--10-feet-tall--or low--three-feet-tall--house on either side of the range.

Once the target is released, a shooter has between one and five seconds to shoot the target, which is traveling 40 to 50 mph.

"Once you see the target 30 yards away form you, nothing goes through your mind," says Randy Karger '99, who is the former president of the club. "It's exciting once you hit the target."

Even if these specific shooting terms forever remain foreign to most Harvard students, Jobin and Burwell hope people understand the nature of what they do.

"It's a sport," Jobin says.