MOVE OVER, SOCCER
Pop. Pop. Pop. At the Minnesota high school trap-shooting championship, more than 8,000 students from some 300 schools gathered in June to blast flying orange discs out of the sky. Over nine days, the sound of bullets firing—hour after hour after hour—becomes ambient noise, like a supermarket soundtrack. Pop. Pop. Pop.
RVs filled the parking lot. Sponsor tents (the U.S. Army, Friends of NRA, a guy selling Donald Trump T-shirts) lined the Alexandria Shooting Park, a grassy stretch in a lake-dotted region around two hours northwest of Minneapolis. Kids in their team uniforms formed a rainbow of red, orange, green, maroon, all shades of blue. Their shirts bore the names of their scholastic trap-shooting squads and the local outfits that support them. For Crosslake Community School, the list includes a local bank, an insurance broker, the American Legion and Grandpa’s General Store.
The Minnesota State High School Clay Target League championship bills itself as the largest shooting sports event in the world. With the bustling crowds and flood of corporate interest, it could be mistaken for, say, a scene on the NASCAR circuit, except that the stars are teenage boys and girls. And they’re armed. That’s the entire point, of course, in a shooting competition, but there are moments when the world beyond scorecards and ear protection edges
