Americans actually do shoot quite well, but the rules around gun handling are incredibly strict for Olympic shooting.

Things like minor celebrations, emotion, or even the cadence of your walk while leaving the range can cause disqualification.

Since American shooters can't hit a bullseye without shotgunning a beer and magdumping into the sky as eagles carry exploding fireworks in celebration, they often do not place in Olympic shooting

The real reason

In fairness, you see that chick from South Korea?

You don't gotta aim to bit a crowd of kids at a school.

Sometimes classroom training doesn't translate.

Not to take anything anyway from the Olympic athletes who are incredibly talented at their sport, but their sport doesn't resemble the practical shooting of real guns.

There are actual competitons for that, such as the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) world shoots. The U.S. is much better represented in these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPSC_Handgun_World_Shoots

mfw the shooting venue wasn't a school

Sucks that there are no schoo children and black people available as targets.

Pfft. I used to bulls-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home.

American shooting is a lot more flash than precision.

Legitimately there's a category of shooting sports that's about the most efficient use of WWI trenchgun style slam firing, which is basically abusing the reload speed on that class of shotgun to convert it into a semi-auto.

We literally made a sport out of what the enemy tried to get classed as a war crime as an act of spite and you're wondering why we not so good at traditional marksmanship? It's a level of decorum that America was basically founded as a fuck you against.

If they had a mass shooting category we would cleanup. Who wants to shoot just one bullet at a time

Competition shooter here. Olympic shooting is boring as hell.

Americans place really well in IPSC, USPSA, and 3gun.

The IPSC rifle world shot is happening right now in Finland.

Olympic shooting is just a different beast. Look at the differences in scores; it's fractions of a point, in most cases. Air guns simply aren't popular in the US, while they're one of the very few options open to most people outside of the US. And, TBH, there's not a lot of support for the Olympic shooting sports in the US, aside from possibly trap.

That’s why muricans need assault rifles.

I can picture the American shooters just doing pray and spray and drive bys

We’re good shooting at crowds, not in front of them on display. Just makes it too weird.

Even Guatemala got their first ever gold metal and it was on shooting and she broke the Olympic record.

We love shooting guns, doesn't mean we're any good at accuracy!

Don't worry. They just wrapped up the Presidential Candidate leg of the competition. School is up next and we're expected to have a strong showing.

Olympic shooting has nothing to do with shooting of any other kind. The guns are custom made. Unless you are speficially training for the Olympics you'll likely never handle such a "weapon". I think using these guns is the equivalent to a running being able to use spring blades. I am not a gun owner but it feels like a pointless sport as done.

Not fair, they won't even allow pre-ban machine guns firing tracer bullets in five round bursts.

No no... America has always been about quantity over quality. This proves that.