Jaime, 13, has a shot at sport’s big names
Daily Telegraph, Page: 5. Monday, 9 March, 2009
Until she takes out her .204 SUB-MOA Vanguard, Jaime Meyer looks like any other 13-year-old girl.
She wears pink canvas shoes and a matching singlet top with a check shirt. She is also very articulate about her right to shoot.
“I’ve been shooting for about two years,” the Penrith teenager said, admitting other girls at school shun her for a “macho sport”.
“Boys think it is cool.
“Everyone gets the perception from TV that you are going around hurting each other.” Her father George introduced her to the sport and she is keen to follow his lead of shooting feral pigs, goats and rabbits.
She uses her own rifle, a .22 registered to her father, for weekend events at the Sporting Shooters Association rifle range.
“It is really relaxing, you are completely focused on the target and it is a challenge,” she said.
Jaime’s mother, Kim, has given her reluctant blessing to the sport.
“I think there is more chance of teenagers getting hurt when they get their driving licence than when they get their gun licence,” she said.
Not every 12-year-old who wants to shoot will get in, SSAA junior development officer Chris Avent said. “If there are individuals we don’t think are mature enough we don’t let them shoot,” she said.
About 60 juniors aged from 12 to 17 show up every Saturday almost half of them girls.
Ms Avent, a teacher, said young people learned a determination from the sport that helped them to be high achievers. One of the group recently got into medicine, she said, while others are set on a career in the defence forces or sporting achievement at the Olympics.
“It actually requires control and practice. It is nothing like their [computer] games, nothing like the movies. It is a sport that requires focus, safety and control at the lowest level of it,” Ms Avent said.
“They are never alone, they are always supervised and the consequences of doing the wrong thing are spelled out in safety lectures.”
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