A handful of kids from the Sitka Spruce Tips 4-H rifle club gather at the local Sportsman Association on Friday night to review the safety tips they learned at their first meeting a week ago. Things like:
“Never keep your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Always keep the gun at a safe position. Never point [it at] anybody, because that’s gonna be bad. You need to have your safety on if you’re not shooting. And remember that when you shoot your bullet, there’s no way you can get that back,” recounted two of the rifle club’s youngest members, 9-year-old Andy and 8-year-old Izzy.
Sitka’s youth rifle club has been dormant for several years after the previous instructor stepped down in 2022. But this year, Andy and Izzy’s dad, Pedro Diaz, revived the program.
A specialist from Kodiak flew down in February to train five local volunteers to teach marksmanship, safety, and responsibility with firearms. The volunteers and kids all came into the program with varying degrees of shooting experience. Some had never touched a gun before joining. Others, like Andy and Izzy, have their own rifles at home, and they say they came into the club already knowing how to clean their guns and how to aim.
“But we still need to learn a little bit. We haven’t learned all it, just a little bit,” Andy said.
He says their dad, Pedro, hunts and wants to teach everyone how to shoot safely.
“What if you want to go shooting or hunting, or it’s just like a hobby, you need to learn how to hold it, how to shoot it, and all [that] stuff,” Andy said. “And there’s rules to it.”
Pedro says the desire to run the club came to him last year during the Sportsman Association’s annual turkey shoot, where Andy won a turkey, but Izzy didn’t.
“That ignited some kind of flame in her to want to get a turkey next year,” he said.
So Pedro relaunched the rifle program to instill confidence, safety, and skill in not only his own kids, but about 17 others participating in this year’s program.
“You can see the kids that have obviously been grown into this sport, and you can also see their interest and eagerness to pursue it further,” he said. “And it’s really cool seeing the kids that are first nervous or afraid of going into the firing range. Once they pull that trigger for the first time, you see this glow in their faces like, ‘Did I just do that?’ And next thing you know, they just want to fire off more rounds and get better at it.”
Carrie Sipple is a parent of an 11-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy in the club. She and her family moved to Sitka from Anchorage last year.
Sipple says guns are nowhere near her family’s comfort zone. But because of the prevalence of firearms on the island — from people hunting, subsisting, or just shooting for sport — she wants her kids to feel confident and prepared to encounter them.
“You don’t want to be casual with your introduction,” she said. “You don’t want to get your introduction to the rifle from the kid down the street who also didn’t get a good introduction, right? So this kind of structure, this kind of deliberate approach, I think it’s kind of necessity at this point. What they decide to do with it is up to them, right? I’m not going to make them ever use it again, but I think this is a really great starting point for living here.”
4-H rifle coach Raven Waltemyer agrees. They came to Sitka from the Lower 48 last year as an Americorps artist fellow.
“I think that learning [rifle safety] from an early age is honestly best practice,” they said. “When I was in outdoor education as a garden educator, we say that even getting infants and preschoolers exposed to dirt and nature as soon as possible makes them less scared of nature later on. And when they’re less scared of nature later on, they’re more encouraged to take risks and to feel more confident and independent in their actions. And so it’s not just that they’re learning the skill of shooting the rifle, but they’re learning the other skills that come with learning the rifle.”
Although there are still many weeks to go in the 4-H rifle program, Pedro says the confidence and skills the students are already picking up is impressive, and he’s one proud coach and dad. And when asked if Izzy’s going to win a turkey this year:
“She’s gonna totally win a turkey,” he said.
And Izzy agrees that she has a shot. But she says if she doesn’t get one, that’s okay, because she can always try again.
