High school sharpshooter places first at state match

By CHRIS TUCKER

Whitefish Pilot

Whitefish shooter Carmen Luke, 16, a sophomore at Whitefish High School, aimed for the gold medal and hit her mark during a state 4-H shooting competition in Bozeman earlier this month.

Luke scored 554 points out of a possible 600 in the small-bore .22 rifle event, making her a back-to-back state champion in the Montana State 4-H Archery and Shooting Sports Competition.

From 50 feet away, Luke used iron sights to shoot at a 12-bull's-eye target. The two center bull's-eyes are used for sighting the rifle, and the surrounding 10 bull's-eyes are for the match shots. Each bull's-eye is worth up to 10 points, depending on how close the bullet comes to hitting the center.

"Most of the time I'm within the 9 and 10 points per bull," Luke said, using the slang term for "bull's-eye."

Each 12-bull target is worth 100 points, and shooters shoot twice from three positions — standing, prone and kneeling — for a total of 600 possible points.

Luke said she has been shooting competitively for about six years.

"It was really hard at first, when I was 10 in the fifth grade because the guns were so heavy," she said. "Now that I'm older, I haven't missed the bull's-eye in a couple of years, and I've never missed a target, which is just a little bit bigger than a sheet of paper."

Shooting competitively is a mental game, Luke said. It's important to relax when shooting, and to naturally and easily lift the rifle into the line of fire, she said, so no aiming adjustments are needed after bringing the rifle into a firing position.

In a different match, the NRA Smallbore Sectional, held March 10 in Missoula, Luke earned two bronze medals — one for three-position small-bore and one for four-position small-bore.

She will keep her rifles in storage for a short while now, however, as Luke is participating in the shot put and triple jump for the high school track team.