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There's a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Reserve_Officers%27_Training_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J
by hga 11y ago
There's a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Reserve_Officers%27_Training_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Reserve_Officers%27_Tra...) program that's reasonably popular in many parts of the US, and weapons training is a popular part of it. When I did it in the late '70s it was small bore/.22LR in the winter when getting out wasn't so practical, and there was an opportunity to go to a "summer camp" where you would practice with real service rifles, practice grenades (they wouldn't let the young ones try out real ones), putting on a gas mask in a tear gas chamber, basically a junior boot camp sort of thing. My parents were no fun at all and wouldn't let me attend the latter :-( which due to eyesight was the closest I ever could get to the real thing ).
And of course a rifle team, in which I had a lot of fun, small bore rifles, 50 feet, the "10" was a dot the size of the hole a needle makes in a piece of paper. Quite challenging and two years of early morning practice really improved my marksmanship, even got a nifty and 100% authentic Expert marksmanship badge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marksmanship_Badges_(United_States)#United_States_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marksmanship_Badges_(United_St...). We on the team helped with the safety monitoring and instruction in the winter rifle marksmanship and that was very worthwhile as well, teaching a novice well enough to get a Marksman badge was a great experience and generally useful for life.
In fact, teaching others was one of the things JROTC explicitly taught, as they pointed out the Army has to constantly teach a lot of people all sorts of things. Definitely one of the most useful things I learned in high school.
- arethuza 11y agoThe CCF used to be called the "Junior Division of the Officers Training Corp" - but I think they renamed it to try and remove the association of public (i.e. private) school -> posh -> officer.