Biathlon story on NPR

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Sooo ..... After airplanes were used in the 9-11 attacks I should have considered surrendering my pilots license? A truck is used to kill 87 people and maim countless others in France therefor CDL holders should consider becoming WalMart greeters?

They just can't help themselves , can they?
 
Then there's this part :
"I remember going to the shooting range the very first day," she says, "loading the magazine and then shooting and smelling gunpowder. It was just a really foreign smell that didn't belong there."

She was expecting maybe potpourri ? Gunpowder smell does not "belong" on a shooting range?

Geez.
 
Waveski said:
Then there's this part :
"I remember going to the shooting range the very first day," she says, "loading the magazine and then shooting and smelling gunpowder. It was just a really foreign smell that didn't belong there."

She was expecting maybe potpourri ? Gunpowder smell does not "belong" on a shooting range?

Geez.
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It does ----- particularly so if it's BLACKPOWDER!:evil:
 
Waveski wrote:
She was expecting maybe potpourri ? Gunpowder smell does not "belong" on a shooting range?
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No, she wasn't. And if you had continued reading you would have seen that the lady's musing went to:

"In the end, she says, she's come to this realization: 'To me, shooting well is such a mastery of emotion, and a mastery of your body. There's nothing violent about it at all. There's no anger in it. There's no room for that. It's all about control: being very precise and very calm and collected...'"​

The American biathletes are not anti-gun and you do them and the entire sport a disservice by making out that coverage by an liberal news outlet somehow taints their feelings about guns.
 
hdwhit said:
No, she wasn't. And if you had continued reading you would have seen that the lady's musing went to:

"In the end, she says, she's come to this realization: 'To me, shooting well is such a mastery of emotion, and a mastery of your body. There's nothing violent about it at all. There's no anger in it. There's no room for that. It's all about control: being very precise and very calm and collected...'"​

The American biathletes are not anti-gun and you do them and the entire sport a disservice by making out that coverage by an liberal news outlet somehow taints their feelings about guns.
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I don’t think Waveski was bashing her or any biathlete. I think the frustration was with NPR. I read them trying to spin this to show someone in a shooting sport that they could paint as for “reasonable gun restrictions”. Granted they never went that far, but it sure looked like they were trying hard.

I don’t know much about biathlon. But I suspect those that compete in it probably a bit more European in their gun views than say those who compete in 3 gun, IDPA, USPSA. Now I don’t have anything to support it, but given this article, the competing in Europe more than here, and the fact most competitors are from more liberal states than southern ones (Not much snow in the south most years)
 
hdwhit said:
No, she wasn't. And if you had continued reading you would have seen that the lady's musing went to:

"In the end, she says, she's come to this realization: 'To me, shooting well is such a mastery of emotion, and a mastery of your body. There's nothing violent about it at all. There's no anger in it. There's no room for that. It's all about control: being very precise and very calm and collected...'"​

The American biathletes are not anti-gun and you do them and the entire sport a disservice by making out that coverage by an liberal news outlet somehow taints their feelings about guns.
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I agree. I guess I’m in the minority in here, but I frequently listen to and enjoy some of the NPR news casts, just as I also like to read the Washington Times. But I digress.

I actually heard that NPR piece on the radio while driving and really liked it. Part of what I got out of her interview was a female athlete overcoming her fear of the unknown and succeeding to the point of not only becoming an international champion but also teaching the next, younger generation. She had never handled, much less shot a rifle before, and because of that was afraid of firearms when she first started. If anything, that part of the story should help others apprehensive but curiuos about firearms to try them out and discover the joy of target shooting we all know too well.
 
equin said:
I agree. I guess I’m in the minority in here, but I frequently listen to and enjoy some of the NPR news casts, just as I also like to read the Washington Times. But I digress.

I actually heard that NPR piece on the radio while driving and really liked it. Part of what I got out of her interview was a female athlete overcoming her fear of the unknown and succeeding to the point of not only becoming an international champion but also teaching the next, younger generation. She had never handled, much less shot a rifle before, and because of that was afraid of firearms when she first started. If anything, that part of the story should help others apprehensive but curiuos about firearms to try them out and discover the joy of target shooting we all know too well.
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Doesn’t that combined with the other points made show the anti gun bias? A more gun friendly writer/interviewer would have spun that to show that shooting isn’t dangerous if done carefully and that it’s enjoyable.

Now please don’t take that as trying to bash anyone as we all have biases. Like you, I try to look at sources that have many different views and positions. I also think I’m not too far out of the norm being in the middle on some issues, a bit to the left on others and the right on others. Of course, one of those “far right” views is on 2nd Amendment issues. But that’s another issue.

I guess as someone who doesn’t know much about biathlon I’d love to see more if it and learn more. Sadly I suspect NBC will show little to none. In fact I’m willing to bet they show more Curlings.
 
Regarding my criticism -

NPR is an extremely biased information source , has been as long as I can remember. I would be very interested to see the full transcript of the interview to determine if the biathlete volunteered the references to the 'Vegas incident , or if she was prompted. Given the source I strongly suspect the subject was floated by the interviewer.

I am sure that the published interview was edited ; most are. NPR therefor had control of the content via editing. To think that NPR included references to the Los Vegas massacre in an interview of an OLympic athlete without deliberate intention of forwarding an agenda is very naive , in my opinion.

Finally , the comment about gunpowder being a foreign smell that "just didn't belong" on a shooting range is puzzling and weird.

That said , Dunklee is a U.S. Olympic Athlete , and she deserves our support. She has mine.

NPR on the other hand .....
 
Biathlon is a unique sport.

It is the conflicting duality of mastering air intake, pulse rate and the like for maximum exertion to generate speed on a cross-country skiing course.

To then need to stop, control breathing and pulse rate to the opposite extreme, to get body rigidity rather than flexibility. To then pick off a sequence of targets in the least amount of time.

All before returning to maximum output exertion.

This is more taxing than two-gun; with the fillip of you need the firing line stress to shoot well; but you need to relax to be able to focus on the XC skiing at best efficiency.

Missing this need to balance opposing types of physical skill is key to any understanding of biathlon. The smell of cordite has nothing to do with it. Nor does any loony notion that "violence" is required.
 
CapnMac said:
Biathlon is a unique sport.

It is the conflicting duality of mastering air intake, pulse rate and the like for maximum exertion to generate speed on a cross-country skiing course.

To then need to stop, control breathing and pulse rate to the opposite extreme, to get body rigidity rather than flexibility. To then pick off a sequence of targets in the least amount of time.

All before returning to maximum output exertion.

This is more taxing than two-gun; with the fillip of you need the firing line stress to shoot well; but you need to relax to be able to focus on the XC skiing at best efficiency.

Missing this need to balance opposing types of physical skill is key to any understanding of biathlon. The smell of cordite has nothing to do with it. Nor does any loony notion that "violence" is required.
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"Cordite" was a fetal version of smokeless powder and has not been in regular use in decades. "The smell of cordite" is an oft-repeated slogan in these types of anti-gun stories, and I'll bet 99.99% of those repeating this drop couldn't even begin to describe what cordite propellant actually is.
 
As I understood her gun powder comment, she was relaying her experience as a young girl shooting a rifle for the very first time. If you think about it, she was probably like most other preteen girls accustomed to perfumes, lotions and things like that - not gunpowder. So it’s understandable that she’d think of it as foreign to her. I think her point was that as a young girl she confronted something completely unknown to her (rifles and the smell of gunpowder) in order to pursue the sport of the biathlon. She didn’t say it’s always foreign to her - just that first time she shot a rifle as part of learning the sport. She now loves it so much she’s been teaching young kids the sport to pass it on and keep it going.

But the gunpowder comment was just one small piece of that interview. There was a lot more about the sport and how it’s so popular in Europe but barely noticeable here. Her European competitors are paid a nice salary to compete, but not her nor other biathletes. She can’t get corporate sponsors here in the US, but she managed to get two European corporate sponsors.

I know there US has a lot of good skiing, and we all know our country has more civilian gun ownership than the rest of the world. So it’s ironic that the sport is nowhere near as popular here as it is in Europe where many more folks there view guns with disdain than they do here.

As an aside, here in Texas we have running “mini” biathlons that are slowly gaining in popularity. The Pecos Run and Gun series is one of the first. I say mini because they’re usually only between 5k to 10K in length, not the much longer distance of an Olympic cross-country skiing biathlon. And ours sometimes have obstacles and usually require two guns, a rifle for long shots and a handgun for short distance shots. But I digress.
 
Hokie_PhD said:
Doesn’t that combined with the other points made show the anti gun bias? A more gun friendly writer/interviewer would have spun that to show that shooting isn’t dangerous if done carefully and that it’s enjoyable.

Now please don’t take that as trying to bash anyone as we all have biases. Like you, I try to look at sources that have many different views and positions. I also think I’m not too far out of the norm being in the middle on some issues, a bit to the left on others and the right on others. Of course, one of those “far right” views is on 2nd Amendment issues. But that’s another issue.

I guess as someone who doesn’t know much about biathlon I’d love to see more if it and learn more. Sadly I suspect NBC will show little to none. In fact I’m willing to bet they show more Curlings.
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do a "biathlon" search on youtube. the ibu world cup events are the best.

murf
 
Kim Rhode won the gold for the USA in trap in 2012. Was there any network coverage of her event? If there was , I missed it.
 
jamesjames said:
Seems to me there are 2 take-aways from this story. #1 is her end comment about shooting sports being about mastery, not anger. #2 is that there is no support for biathlon. We in the shooting community should take this as a wake up call.
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+1

I've been following this thread since it came up. There seems to be such a thread ever four years or so.... Regarding the current line of discussion, first of all, I don't think Bailey intended any anti gun comments. Secondly, I wouldn't expect NPR to produce a piece about firearms to have a positive spin. That being said, here's a little story about biathletes and the sport.

I was skiing at the Nordic center across from Purgatory, near Durango, Colorado one day in the winter on 01-02 when I came across a couple piles of .22 brass. These piles had hundreds of pieces each. I thought, "Cool! Biathlon!" and my mind raced to 4H, a high school team, possibly a league...? It turned out I had come across an area used by Tracy and Lanny Barnes. https://www.ssusa.org/articles/2016/10/31/olympic-biathletes-tracy-and-lanny-barnes/ These two women were relatively unknown then, but made news when Tracy Barnes gave her spot on the Olympic team to her sister in 2014. I haven't heard much about them since then, other than Lanny has become a 3-Gun competitor and recently appeared at a SHOT show.

https://www.ssusa.org/articles/2017/8/25/lanny-barnes-wins-big-at-rocky-mountain-3-gun/
 
P5 Guy said:
Kim Rhode has won medals since 1992.
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Which is a major accomplishment. IIRC, Rhode is one of only three people to have medalled in six Olympiads. In 2020, she's likely to become the only person to medal in seven.

And yes, the NBC Sports coverage is trash. Of the American broadcast networks, they are the least capable of covering the vast variety of sports...not to mention the anti-gun bias.

Not to mention that any American shooting in ANY International discipline is scraping for money. USA Shooting doesn't have much. The USOC just cut all funding for our Olympic pistol shooters...perhaps they figure they'll need the money to pay damages. I won't even mention how dirt-poor the non-Olympic sports are...every U.S. competitor at the World Muzzle-Loading Championships will be paying every penny of his airfare and lodging out of his own pocket.
 
Mike OTDP said:
I won't even mention how dirt-poor the non-Olympic sports are...every U.S. competitor at the World Muzzle-Loading Championships will be paying every penny of his airfare and lodging out of his own pocket.
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Who do you think should be paying for it? Not the taxpayers, I hope.
 
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