So there I was, standing there with a huge rifle tucked under my arm, in an outfit so constraining I could barely breathe. Think of the most padded red Burton snowboard pants in existence cinched up to your ribcage, paired with a jacket so tight they had to use a special tool just to get the buttons closed. I couldn’t even bend my elbows. “The position we have you in is the easiest one to stand in,” coach Keith Miller said. “It’s less constraining.” He had to be joking, right? It turns out he wasn’t. There are two other positions in rifling, kneeling and prone, and both are harder to teach. “As far as getting into the routine of how it feels, after a week you’re very used to how it feels,” veteran shooter Noel Keck, a senior in criminology, said as she watched bemusedly and ate a sandwich. “After a year, if you do the exact same thing in practice, you’ve got it down.” I gave it a try, this thing they practice every day in the basement of Reynolds Coliseum or at a shooting range in Holly Springs. I naively expected a slightly more difficult version of a video game, but that guess was way off. First off, my borrowed gun was extremely heavy, and the smallest shift will send your shot awry. Sneezing and scratching your nose are apparently big no-no’s. “Lift the gun up, over, and down,” Katie Siegert, a junior in business administration and my very patient instructor, told me over and over again. After I failed to put my elbow down on my hip in the right manner for what felt like the billionth time, Siegert employed a method that the rifle team calls the “bear hug.” She scrunched my arms together like a stuffed animal until she got me into exactly the right pose. “Rifle is very much how it feels, so if you can get someone to get you into the right position, it’s easier to fire the second time,” Siegert assured me. The trigger was so sensitive that the slightest touch would send the gun kicking back into your shoulder. Miller and his team told me several cautionary tales about the horrors that occur when one doesn’t keep their finger far away until the last second. After I tried out my own trigger finger on a slab of bulletproof glass, it was finally time to try and hit a target. I missed by a wide margin. “You haven’t done this before,” Siegert told me cheerfully. “No one picks up a rifle the first time hits the center target every time. It’s impossible.” Most newer facilities have electronic scoring, but the N.C. State rifling team kicks it old school. A “plug,” which looks like a little green Monopoly piece, is inserted into the hole produced by the pellet to determine your score. “You have a lot of 9.9’s,” Keck said. “It’s so close to a ten you can’t even see the difference, but it still counts as a point less.” Miller said they often allow new shooters to try out, but for one reason or another, it doesn’t work out. The gender ratio tends to shift more toward the pink because, as Miller puts it, girls have the tendency to be more of a “tabula rosa,” or a clean slate. “The easiest person for us to teach to shoot quickly is a teenaged woman, especially if she hasn’t shot before,” Miller said. “These guys come in here with a certain level of testosterone, even if they don’t have a clue. Women are more likely to say ‘okay, I’ll try that.'” Even after my crash course, the team assured me kindly that I was not quite ready to represent N.C. State in the Collegiate Sectional on Feb. 14. I gave up after two shots and took off the painful gear, a process that took a total of three people to complete. “Our gear is goofy, and it ain’t sexy, but it works,” Miller said.