ISSF Shooting

The Jamaica Rifle Association is a members’ club which fosters the development of the shooting sport fraternity, and the ISSF group is where that starts youngest: newcomers are welcome from ten years old.

The club’s speciality is 50m Rifle Prone, shot with smallbore rifles. The event asks a shooter to fire 60 shots in 55 minutes while trying to hit an area half the size of a one-dollar coin 50m away, using a .22 rifle with iron sights and unaided vision. A perfect card is 600 in integers, or 654 counting decimals.

The 50m prone competition runs at every level, from the regional Copa del Caribe through the Pan American and Commonwealth Games to the Olympic Games every four years. An Olympian has to make a Minimum Qualifying Score of 587/600, or 614/654 in decimals.

The association has developed a 10m Air Range — Range 4 — to bring air rifle and air pistol into the programme and widen Jamaica’s presence internationally. Beginners shoot the club’s own Remington 40-X .22 Long Rifles; as they progress, athletes tend to buy their own from Anschütz, Feinwerkbau, Bleiker or Walther. The rifle, though, is still just a piece of equipment: developing a shooter takes the person and the kit together.