Unpopular Opinion
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Couple things.
First, firearms are used for sporting and competition of marksmanship by millions of Americans, and Europeans.
IPSC / USPSA are massively popular and all you ever do is put holes in paper or hit steel targets. The gear is purpose designed explicitly for this. So is the ammunition. Even down to the holsters and mag pouches. It’s ALL for the game of the sport.
The civilian marksmanship program is again, millions of Americans across many cities nation wide. A rifle designed to shoot a Palma match, or an F-class match, or benchrest rifles are specific to those disciplines. Nothing about a 37 lb sled riding benchrest rifle is designed to harm a person. It’s a purpose built tool for competition where mostly old people drive them with dials on a sled and put small groups on paper far away. They often don’t even get shouldered.
Sporting clays, variations of this are Olympic sports. There is no possible way to say an over under shotgun has been designed from the ground up for harming people. It’s a tool built around the rules of the sport. 2 shotgun shells. That’s all it can hold and is long as hell with a massive choke on it to control spread of small pellets precisely, pellets that are very bad at killing. Birdshot is almost never lethal past extremely short ranges and they are engaging clays at 40-80 yards.
PRS competitions are bolt action rifles with physical exercise and difficult physical stages under time pressure to shoot steel. Most have transitioned away from high energy calibers, like military chosen caliber that are for imparting energy into a target, and to small bullets you can watch trace in the scope for… you guess it, the specifics of the sport.
.22 long rifle is extremely popular in sports speaking of small cartridges. It’s what we use in Olympic competitions and bi-athalons that ski and shoot bolt action rifles. We use it in small bore pistol and rifle matches the world over. It’s terrible at killing a person, but is great for target use at 10 meters. Which is what the Olympics world over do.
I could go on and on with more examples. Firearms are just not used for killing things. They have in many countries beyond the US, a strong and friendly competition community for sport that only sees paper hole punching. The UK had a thriving and popular rifle community. France, Sweden, Finland, and Italy have thriving sporting gun competition cultures as well.
I live in a city of 2.5 million people in it and he surrounding area. I shoot every weekend for sport, as I have done since I was on a shooting team in high school, run by my high school. I won a junior olympic medal in that team. I love the engineering and competition elements of the sports and would highly encourage you to try one to see if your view might be expanded to see how kind and friendly the sports are to anyone new coming to try them.