BOILED down to its essential points, the message of the press release from the organisers of National Shooting Week was simple.

“Come down to Barbury Shooting School and learn to shoot clays with shotguns,” was the essence of it, and I didn’t need asking twice.

That’s how I came to meet veteran clay target coach John King on a beautiful spring morning in the midst of the Wiltshire countryside. It’s also how I ended up wondering where this fantastic sport had been all my life.

As John, 66, who has taught more than 30,000 people to shoot, put it: “The main attraction is that it’s a primeval thing.

“It’s like striking a golf ball, like hitting a tennis ace, like a perfect fly cast – it’s that human satifsaction in striking a target.”

I couldn’t describe it better myself. As John pointed out when I managed to shatter a clay with my second shot and hit the next few: “At first you just had a big grin on your face but now you’re gritting your teeth. It’s satisfying.”

And standing there with the double-barreled shotgun in my arms, the smell of cordite drifting into my nostrils and bringing memories of childhood fireworks displays into my mind, satisfied is precisely how I felt.

There are about a million holders of shotgun certificates in the UK, although five times that number are regular participants in shotgun sports.

National Shooting Week runs all this week up until Sunday, and is organised by the Countryside Alliance on behalf of the British Shooting Sports Council.

Its stated aims are to promote respect for and understanding of legal guns, and to enable people to try shooting for the first time.

The “respect and understanding” aspects are important, because most news stories involving guns tend also to involve violence or tragedy. People who’ve never seen a gun at close quarters could almost be forgiven for fearing that it might rear up of its own accord and strike like some vicious serpent.

John King has no truck with such sentiments, and believes a growing number of people feel the same way.

“Over the last five or six years,” he said, “people have become fed up with the nanny state.

“People now go and find out about things for themselves rather than being told what’s good and what’s bad.”

I’ll admit to feeling a certain ‘gun-squeamishness’ before handling a shotgun for the first time, and then realising that such sentiments are silly. A gun is no more dangerous in and of itself than a shovel, a Morris Minor or a bowl of hot soup.

As pick-up truck bumper stickers south of the Mason-Dixon line often proclaim: “Guns don’t kill people – people do.”

John always begins his instruction of beginners with some common sense safety rules. The safe clay shooter keeps his or her gun pointed away from others at all times, assumes any shotgun is loaded until they have broken it and revealed it not to be, shoots only at the designated targets and never, ever, presses repeatedly on the trigger if there’s an apparent malfunction.

On the day I visited, he began by telling the assembled beginners how to shoot a clay heading away from us. “Imagine it has feet and shoot at where they would be,” was his bizarre but sound advice, and I managed to shatter a clay on my second attempt.

Then it was time to fire at some heading over our heads, this time by waiting until our guns made the clay invisible. It was counter-intuitive but it worked.

The clays, incidentally, are catapulted into the air by devices that are remotely controlled. I had half expected them to be operated by real live humans, but I daresay that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Just as well, really.

As it happened, the only life forms in any potential danger from stray lead were a group of fearless housemartins who nest there every year, and John told me they’ve never been caught in any friendly fire.

For me, the test of an experience like my morning at Barbury is whether I’d do it again on my own time and my own money.

The answer as far as clay shooting goes is a definite ‘yes’.