Sport and firearms have long and close historical ties. In pre-modern Europe, hunting and marksmanship were central elements of what was known in French as desport, which originally referred to various types of leisure activities, and it is telling that the terms sport and game in modern English have also come to have close ties to shooting. Even today, firearms play a clear role in this world, which is defined by concepts that can be linked to play, in the sense of ‘leisure’. While weapons have clearly been linked to sport, play and games, they have also had an extremely clear link to what, according to historian Johan Huizinga, is the opposite of play, namely seriousness. Firearms have been seen as crucial tools for fulfilling basic human needs, partly as a means of enabling food procurement, hunting or sustainable ecosystems, but even more so for maintaining various types of security. This presentation highlights how early 20th century Swedish shooting sports handled these connotations and the links between them, in order to provide new important perspectives to gun culture and sports in modern Sweden.