How Congress once set out to make every American a rifleman in 1903

Picture a member of Congress today proposing that the federal government improve the marksmanship of ordinary citizens and supply the rifles. He would be accused of wanting a war. Yet in 1903 Congress did precisely that, with bipartisan comfort, and the program it launched is still running today, one of the longest-lived examples of Washington encouraging private citizens to be armed and skilled.

That fact deserves more attention than it gets. Gun-control advocates like to say that the founding-era militia is a relic, and that no sensible government wants a population of marksmen. The Congress of 1903 did not agree. Neither, for that matter, did the War Department. The story of how the country decided it needed riflemen, and how it came to pay for them, is an American civics lesson with targets in it.

Why did the Army worry about marksmanship in 1898?

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was short, and it was won. It was also, in parts, embarrassing. The volunteer regiments raised that spring were large, enthusiastic and often poorly trained in the business of shooting. Many men had never fired a modern rifle in practice. Army officers noticed the gap and said so in their reports. A country that fought its wars with citizen soldiers depends on the citizens knowing how to use the tools they are handed.

This was not a new worry. Some thirty years earlier, after the Civil War, two Union veterans, William Church and George Wingate, founded the National Rifle Association in 1871 for a similar reason: they thought Northern marksmanship had been weaker than it should have been, and they wanted to fix it. Ambrose Burnside, a Union general, was its first president. The idea that private rifle practice served a public purpose was already a generation old. What 1898 added was urgency.

Secretary of War Elihu Root led Army reforms after the war. In 1903 two measures touched the question. The first was the Militia Act of 1903, often called the Dick Act after its sponsor, Representative Charles Dick of Ohio, which reorganized the state militias into what became the National Guard and tied them more closely to federal standards. The second, in the same year, created the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which Root was authorized to establish under a War Department appropriations measure. Different laws, same insight: if the nation needed trained riflemen in a crisis, it should not wait for the crisis to start training them.

What did the board do?

The board's purpose was set out in its name. It was to promote rifle practice, and its members came from the Army, the militia and the civilian shooting world. It advised the Secretary of War, helped organize rifle competitions and encouraged the formation of civilian rifle clubs. The key point is the audience. This was not a program for soldiers on duty alone. It reached private citizens, boys and men and eventually women who joined clubs and shot on ranges.

A word on the other half of the policy. The government had rifles. After wars, it had surplus ones. Over the following years the War Department made rifles and ammunition available to approved civilian clubs, at low cost, so that members could practice with the same type of weapon a soldier would carry. The Civilian Marksmanship Program still sells surplus service rifles to qualified buyers today. In plain English: Congress did not merely tolerate private ownership of military-pattern rifles. It sold them.

The National Matches and Camp Perry

If you want to know where the program lives, the answer is Ohio.

The National Matches, a series of rifle and pistol competitions held under the board's sponsorship, started in 1903. The first matches were held at Sea Girt, New Jersey. In the following years they moved to a new range on the shore of Lake Erie, near Port Clinton, Ohio, named Camp Perry after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. The land there was bought in 1906, and Camp Perry became the permanent home of the National Matches, which still bring thousands of competitors there to shoot.

I like this part because it is American in the best way. Nobody was drafted. Competitors came from state militias, the regular services and civilian clubs, and they shot against each other for trophies and for pride. The government supplied the range and the organization. The citizens supplied the effort and, frequently, the family tradition. A grandfather brings a grandson, the grandson brings a rifle he shot in a junior program, and a country builds a habit of competence.

A short timeline

• 1871: the National Rifle Association is founded to improve marksmanship.
• 1898: the Spanish-American War shows weaknesses in the training of volunteers.
• 1903: Congress passes the Militia Act and creates the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice; the first National Matches are held at Sea Girt.
• 1906 to 1907: The Camp Perry land is acquired, and the matches settle there.
• 1916: the first Director of Civilian Marksmanship is appointed to run the civilian side of the program.
• 1996: Congress turns the civilian marksmanship function into a federally chartered corporation, the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

How did the civilian program survive?

For most of the twentieth century the effort was overseen by the Army, with an official called the Director of Civilian Marksmanship from 1916. Over the decades it sold surplus rifles to club members and ran the competitions. In 1996, Congress changed the structure. Title XVI of the defense authorization act for fiscal year 1996 created a corporation to replace the old board, and the Civilian Marksmanship Program, a federally chartered nonprofit, is the name most people know. It receives donated surplus rifles, and it sells them to qualified buyers, to run training for juniors, and to host events at Camp Perry.

Think about what happened there. In 1996, with the political fight over gun control in full cry, Congress went out of its way to write a federal charter making private rifle training a permanent institution. It is hard to hold both positions at once: that the government has no interest in an armed and trained citizenry, and that a law of the United States created a federal corporation for the express purpose of producing one.

What does this have to do with the Second Amendment?

A great deal, in my view. Let me lay out the argument in three steps.

1. The amendment begins with the militia. Its first clause says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The Founders thought that a free state needed citizens who could fight, and who owned and understood their own weapons.
2. The militia clause in the Constitution gives Congress a role. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to provide for "organizing, arming, and disciplining" the militia. The word is arming. The Constitution does not say the militia should show up with nothing. It tells Congress to see to it that they are armed and trained.
3. The 1903 policy fits that design. Congress was exercising its constitutional authority to see that the citizenry could shoot. It did so not by confiscating rifles but by distributing them and teaching their use.

The objection: that was then, this is now

The best argument against reading too much into 1903 runs like this. Government encouraged marksmanship in an era when wars were fought by massed infantry, and a citizen who could hit a target was valuable. Modern warfare is a matter of technology and professional forces, so the original rationale has faded. A rifle program was a defense policy, not a statement about individual rights, and it tells us nothing about what the Second Amendment guarantees.

That is a fair argument, and part of it is right. The 1903 program was a defense policy. But the answer does not depend on the military value. Two points.

First, the Supreme Court held in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) that the individual right protected by the Second Amendment does not depend on service in a militia, and that the prefatory clause announces a purpose without limiting the operative one. The program matters not because it proves the right, but because it shows the government's own understanding of what an armed citizen is good for. A government that spends public money teaching civilians to shoot has said, by deed, that the civilian with a rifle is an asset to the republic and not a menace to it.

Second, the policy has outlasted the military rationale. Camp Perry still hosts competitions. The Civilian Marksmanship Program still runs junior programs. These are now sporting and educational efforts as much as military ones. If the government's interest in a skilled citizenry were purely wartime, it would have ended with the Army's need. That it did not tells you the interest runs deeper: training in the safe and skillful use of firearms is itself a public good, as hunters, competitors and parents who take their children to a range know.

Hunting, conservation and the larger tradition

There is a second tradition that grows from the same soil. As Duck stamps and the Dingell-Johnson Act, conservation the sportsman paid for explains, American hunters and shooters have paid for wildlife conservation through taxes and fees on their own gear. They are a constituency that builds things. The rifle program belongs alongside it: it is a case where armed citizens supply a public benefit, whether that is habitat or competence.

It also sits next to the militia laws of the early republic. Every able-bodied man must own a musket, the Militia Act of 1792 and its heirs traces how the Militia Act of 1792 required that citizens enrolled in the militia supply themselves with a musket or rifle, a bayonet or, for riflemen, a powder horn, powder and balls, and a knapsack. That is, in effect, the opposite policy from disarmament: the government demanded that the citizen be armed. The 1903 program is a late echo of it, with the government now supplying the equipment instead of ordering the citizen to buy it.

For the framing and the wider history, see ninety years of federal gun law in the dates that changed the rules, which lists the federal gun laws in order, and Annie Oakley, the Ohio sharpshooter who wanted every woman to learn to shoot, which tells the story of the Ohio markswoman who made the case that shooting was a skill for everyone. Together they show a country that, for most of its history, thought training Americans to shoot was a good idea.

Why training matters more than ownership

Here is a point that gets lost when the argument is only about hardware. A rifle in a closet is an object. A rifle in the hands of a person who has been taught to handle it is a skill, and skill is what the 1903 Congress was after. The program's founders understood that safety and competence are linked. The shooter who has practiced on a range, under rules, with a coach who insists on muzzle discipline, is the shooter least likely to cause an accident.

That logic should appeal to people on every side of the debate, and it is worth pressing on the ones who say they want gun owners to be responsible. If responsibility is the goal, then the government that once subsidized training is a better partner than the government that makes training harder to find. Ranges close under zoning pressure. Insurance costs rise. Youth programs face questions that no youth program for any other sport would face. A country that wants safe gun owners should want more ranges, more coaches and more junior programs, and the 1903 model is the template.

Consider the numbers a family would care about, in the plainest terms. A teenager who spends a summer in a supervised junior program learns a set of rules that stay with him: treat every firearm as loaded, keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot, know your target and what is behind it. None of that is controversial among people who actually shoot. It is the closest thing to a universal creed that the shooting world has, and it was taught, for generations, with federal encouragement.

A word to the skeptics

I know there are readers who find this uncomfortable. They would prefer to think that official policy has always leaned toward fewer guns. The record does not support that. Congress has at times restricted certain weapons and certain buyers. It has also, for more than a century, run a program whose stated purpose was to put rifles in the hands of private citizens and teach them to hit what they aimed at. Both facts belong in the account. When an argument forgets the second one, it is not telling you the history. It is telling you a preference.

There is also a lesson in the comedy of it. Picture the same hearing today. A member rises and says: "The gentleman from Ohio proposes that the federal government sell surplus rifles to civilians and that they gather on the shore of Lake Erie to compete." The coverage writes itself. "Lawmaker wants to arm the lakeshore." And yet it has happened every summer for the better part of a century, and the people who attend are mostly families with lawn chairs.

The case in brief

1. The Spanish-American War exposed weak marksmanship, and Congress responded in 1903 by creating a board to promote rifle practice among citizens, not only soldiers.
2. The National Matches, first held at Sea Girt and then centered on Camp Perry in Ohio, gave that policy a permanent home and a competitive culture.
3. For decades the government sold surplus rifles to approved civilians and clubs, and in 1996 Congress made the Civilian Marksmanship Program a federally chartered corporation.
4. The Constitution's militia clause empowers Congress to provide for "organizing, arming, and disciplining" the militia, so encouraging an armed and skilled citizenry is part of the design, not a departure from it.
5. The record answers the claim that Washington has always wanted fewer armed citizens: for over a century, it paid to produce more skilled ones.

What you can do: look up the Civilian Marksmanship Program and your nearest accredited range or club, and take a young person to a safety course.