ANCIENT ORIGINS

SPORT BORN FROM THE AGE OF PISTOLS AT DAWN AND THE WILD WEST

In the 10th century archery and spear-throwing had given way to a device developed by the Swiss called the halberd, which combined a spear, an axe and hook in a long mechanism that was held almost like a modern-day gun. By the 14th century, the Germans had developed the halberd concept to create the wheel-lock musket and shooting clubs started to emerge.

The musket proper, which used gunpowder to blow out bullets along a tube, evolved from the court of King Charles VIII of France, who wanted flexibility on the battlefield. The more gunpowder, the fiercer the shot, but the musket was a clumsy and inaccurate shot.

The addition of a rifle bore to musket technology in the 16th century led to greater accuracy and the popularity of guns as weapons of sport, as opposed to war, spread more widely. Accuracy became ever-more important in the age of pistols at dawn, a duff dueller destined to be a shooter no more.

That said, the driving force of progress remained the desire to conquer and control, and the pioneers of gun development were white settlers in what would become the United states of America. The arrival of the flintlock rifle in 1710, the need for it driven by those pushing back native Indians and the boundaries of the new frontier in the US, also helped to popularise the sport of shooting. Events known as "turkey shoots" were organised at which shooters would fire at fixed targets some 100 yards away.

By the 19th century, when percussion caps were introduced to guns, competitions were attracting vast crowds. The new entertainment was not confined to firing at bottles on walls. Trap-shooting events in the 1830s involved firing at pigeons as well as glass balls and clay plates. It is claimed that Annie Oakley, a wild woman of the Wild West, once scored 4,772 out of 5,000 glass balls released from traps 15m away from where she stood.

European shooters started to use sights and long-barrelled guns in the late 19th century and similar match rifles emerged in the US just before the turn of the century. The British National Rifle Association introduced pistol shooting in 1885, the sport taken up by the American Rifle Association in 1886.

International contact between members of the shooting fraternity led to the formation of national federations and, in 1907, eight of those formed the International Shooting Union, later to become the International Shooting Sport Federation.

The most notorious Olympic shooter was Dr James H Snook, a member of the winning US free pistol team in 1920; he was put to death in the electric chair nine years later after confessing to murdering his mistress. He did not, however, use a gun, but a hammer.