Is Your Child Interested In Target Shooting? Here's How To Purchase Rifles As His Or Her Shooting Skills Develop

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Is Your Child Interested In Target Shooting? Here's How To Purchase Rifles As His Or Her Shooting Skills Develop

14 March 2019
 Categories: Business, Blog


If your child has expressed an interest in target shooting, you may not know where to start. The best way to do it is to progress through a series of rifles that are suitable for your child's age and level of skill at target shooting. As an added bonus, this prevents you from paying for an expensive rifle at the outset — if your child doesn't enjoy target shooting, you don't want to find this out after you've spent hundreds of dollars on a rifle. Read on for the best way to match a small-bore target shooting rifle to your child's target shooting skills.

Starting Out

Pellet rifles (commonly referred to as BB guns) are the best first choice for a child who's interested in target shooting. Why? There's no recoil, ammunition is cheap and the guns themselves are incredibly inexpensive — if your child decides that he or she doesn't find target shooting fun, then you didn't spend very much money on your purchase compared to starting out with a more expensive rifle.

Of course, pellet rifles have numerous downsides. They're notoriously inaccurate, so they can only reliably hit targets at short ranges. The sights on pellet rifles also tend to be poor, which further hampers accuracy. Pellet rifles are a good choice to find out if your child has fun going target shooting, but they can't be used to develop target shooting skills — they're simply not accurate enough to determine if it's the gun or the shooter at fault when you miss a target.

Improving Shooting Skills and Accuracy

Because of the shortcomings of pellet guns, your child will have to upgrade to a more accurate firearm in order to really get a feel for target shooting. A more accurate rifle allows your child to practice skills like breath control, zeroing his or her sights and shot placement.

The standard in small-bore target shooting is the .22LR rifle, and it's the next logical step for your child after a pellet rifle. .22LR rifles are lightweight and produce very little recoil when fired, which makes them suitable for children to learn with. Additionally, they're also fairly quiet. While your child still needs to wear hearing and eye protection while shooting, accidentally firing a round while not wearing hearing protection isn't going to cause major hearing damage.

On top of that, many rifle manufacturers make .22LR rifles that are designed to be used by young children. They have shorter barrels and stocks, which allows small arms to maneuver and hold them more easily. Most are single-shot rifles, which improves safety — your child has to chamber a round into the rifle's action after every shot, which makes them less dangerous than semi-automatic rifles that hold multiple rounds. 

Moving Towards Adult Rifles

Eventually, the short barrel length will hamper accuracy at long ranges, and the single-shot nature of youth .22LR rifles will become an annoyance. Once your child is a teenager, you may wish to consider upgrading to a .22LR rifle made for adults.

This is a wide category, with rifles ranging from entry-level all the way to custom-designed .22LR rifles using carbon aftermarket parts like Volquartsen rifles. The higher-end of the .22LR rifle market is suitable for small-bore target shooting at the competitive level, so if your child has been dutifully working on his or her shooting skills, you may wish to splurge and spend the extra money for a custom-manufactured .22LR rifle. They're very durable and parts are easily replaced, so it's a worthy investment that will allow your child to keep developing his or her target shooting skills.

Finally, remember that even pellet rifles are dangerous — always train your child to practice proper firearm safety. If you're not familiar with target shooting or firearm safety, find an instructor or enroll your child in safety classes. Once your child has learned to safely handle a firearm, the next step is to buy a rifle and make sure he or she puts in lots of time shooting targets at the range.