HISTORY

History of shooting in Malaysia.

Shooting was introduce in Malaya  on 1903.  However, shooting could hardly be described as a sport then as it was organized for particular purpose.

The Hannigan Shield and Warren Shield Sport Shooting Competition were confined to police personnel. It was unheard of for publics to take part in police competitions at the turn of the century.

It took a long 22 years before shooting was introduced to civilians when the Penang Free School’s cadets became the exclusive ones to try out the sport and given proper shooting training in 1925.

As the sport grew in popularity, shooting enthusiasts, especially police personnel, felt there was a need to organize proper Inter-State competitions. Thus, the birth of the Osborne Shield in 1930. It continued uninterrupted until the Japanese occupation of Malaya in 1941.

After 1945, the British Military Forces, English plantation owners and local hunters revived shooting with spontaneous competitions. They treated it more as a hobby than a sport.

The development of interests has led to the construction of temperory shooting range at the Wardiburn Camp in Setapak, Kuala Lumpur where some British units were stationed in the late forties and fifties.

Interest for the sport soon gathered momentum with the new Wardiburn Camp and a group of locals, led by the late Tan Sri S.M. Yong, formed a legitimate shooting association, now known as the Selangor Shooting Association (SSA), in 1948.

Initially the small group of shooters were more interested in hunting than target shooting. Nevertheless, some 20 to 25 enthusiastic licensed gun owners, spearheaded by the charismatic Tan Sri Yong, an Ex-Chief Justice of Malaya, eventually formed SSA.

Tan Sri Yong was also the founder president of the National Shooting Association of Malaysia (NSAM).

Shooting was establish as a sport in the country on an organized basis in1949 with  the formation of the  Natinal Shooting Association of Malaysia (NSAM). In the last twenty years, Malaysians have shot their way in international competitions such as the Commonwealth and Asian Games.