Brown senior Brenna Brucker, a co-president of the university-based gun club, prepares to shoot down a clay pigeon at the Tiverton Rod and Gun Club.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

TIVERTON — A group of Brown University students makes its way to the top of a hill overlooking Narragansett Bay, each one taking a quick assessment of the surroundings: a cloudless sky, Aquidneck Island and the towering white wind turbine in Portsmouth on the horizon, a white-and-gray hawk gliding overhead.

It is 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday –– practically daybreak by college standards –– but this bunch is chipper. Save for a brisk and steady wind, it is a fine day for shooting.

“It feels great to get outside, to get outside the city. I miss the outdoors and I miss Vermont,” says Peter Amato, a freshman from the Green Mountain State who is joining the group for the first time, as he waited to fire a shotgun.

A student organization has taken off at Brown University this year that might surprise some: a gun club. Amato was one of seven club members spending the day blasting clay targets out of the sky at the private Tiverton Rod and Gun Club, which has taken the college students under its wing.

“You wouldn’t think that there would be such a demand for this on such a liberal campus, but we’re growing. We have 70 members on our listserve, the most out of any year,” said club co-president Brenna Brucker, a senior.

The Brown University Gun Club, formed three years ago, is the only college organization of its kind in Rhode Island. Its members have shot rifles, pistols and shotguns at indoor target ranges and gun clubs around the state. (The club rents firearms for a day of shooting at a range and does not keep guns at the university.)

But while the club is an officially sanctioned student activity, it does not receive university support. Co-president Daniel Morgan, a junior, says the gun club is seeking a university budget to pay for travel expenses and tournament registration fees. It is scheduled to make a formal presentation this week.

Next year, the club hopes to jump into the world of interscholastic trap shooting, taking competitive aim at clay pigeons with shotguns. They would join a group of about a half dozen New England schools, including Yale, the University of Connecticut, the University of Vermont and the University of Maine, with club-level shooting teams.

“Trap shooting is a gentleman’s sport,” says John Means, a member of Tiverton Rod and Gun who teaches new shooters about gun safety. “It dates back to the late 1700s and was introduced into the Olympic program in 1900.”

The Brown University Gun Club’s bid to gain university funds comes at a time when two recent events are likely to reignite the debate about the gun’s place in modern America.

A Pittsburgh man on Saturday opened fire on police officers responding to a domestic disturbance call and killed three of them. And in Binghamton, N.Y., on Friday, a gunman entered an immigrant services center and killed 13 people before taking his own life.

“These are extraordinarily infrequent events,” said Morgan. “More people each year get killed in car accidents than by gun violence.”

Added Amato: “The gun is a tool, and any tool can be used as a weapon. Ultimately, it’s about responsibility. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

But club co-founder Andres Douglas Castroviejo, who hails from Spain, noted that there may be a connection between the high incidence of gun violence in the United States and its gun policy, which is comparatively more lax than most Western European countries.

The topic of gun policy is a touchy one for the Brown club: Brucker says that it has chosen not to take a political stand on national gun policy, but there are plans to organize gun-related discussions and lectures at the university, if the club receives funding.

Club members say they come from “all walks of life,” with some describing themselves as fairly liberal, moderate or conservative.

“These are horrible events,” Brucker said of the shootings in Pittsburgh and Binghamton. “But you also hear about all of these accounts of guns going off accidentally and hurting people, and that is something this club is about, raising awareness about gun safety.”

Other university gun clubs, such as the Harvard Law School Target Shooting Club, which was formed in 2001, do advocate for gun rights. (A Harvard spokesperson on Saturday said the university does not recognize any shooting clubs; no one responded to the e-mails sent to the organization.)

While the group that was in Tiverton on Sunday included a number of seasoned shooters, the gun club has attracted students with varying skill levels.

Some are like two of Sunday’s newcomers, Jeremy Russell and David Brown Schidle, both of whom had shot a firearm at least once in their lives, but never regularly. Still others have jumped at the chance to try something that is banned in their homeland, such as a few Chinese nationals who came out on a recent shooting day, according to John Sequeira, another Tiverton Rod and Gun member who is working with the university club.

“Most kids who join have not shot anything before and want the chance to find something new,” says Brucker, who grew up in western Pennsylvania competing in the summer biathlon (which combines running and riflery) in high school. “That’s what this is about: the sport of shooting and the competition.”

pmarcelo@projo.com