The origins of Laura Coles' surprise triumph in the women's skeet lie with John Howard's gun buy-back scheme.
The 27-year-old West Australian was in disbelief on Friday at winning Commonwealth Games gold at Carnoustie, having been thrilled simply to make the final four.
Breezing into the final she went on to land 14 out of 16 targets to beat Wales' Elena Allen at the Barry Buddon Shooting Centre and stamp herself as a new leading figure in Australian sports shooting.
"My goal was semi-finals so very surprised to have actually pulled it and got the gold medal," she said. "I felt very nervous at the beginning of the day and sort of settled in from there and was overjoyed to have made the semi-finals so I sort of rode the wave of confidence from that."
Coles, an exercise physiologist, scaled the podium while in attendance were her mother Lee and father Glenn, who played a crucial role in getting her into the sport more than decade ago.
However, Friday's gold medal can be traced further back to when Coles' grandfather Ray handed down a trap gun to her father as a result of then Prime Minister Howard's crackdown on firearms.
"Pop had shot clay targets in the past and given away the sport. But he'd kept his gun until the gun buy-back, where you either had to get a gun cabinet or hand your guns into the police," Coles said.
"My Grandad didn't want to get a gun cabinet so my Dad already had one because he had guns. And there was no way he was going to hand his guns in, so Pop just gave all his guns to my Dad and in there was a 12-gauge trap gun."
Coles was 15 when she tagged along with her father to a local sporting shooters club. Despite predictable difficulty to begin with, she was hooked.
"When I first started with guns it as the air rifle, the .22 at cans and bottles and then Dad took me out to the clay target club and I had a go with the shotgun which was very different and sort of scary," she said.
"I ended up with a few bruises and I didn't shoot very well - I think I only hit three out of 25 targets. But I decided to keep going with it because there was something about it that really interested me.
"When you shoot everything else just disappears and you're left in the moment. There's a certain joy from that and it's about bettering yourself. It doesn't matter how someone else shoots, just as long as you shoot well."
Coles' grandfather did not make the trip to Scotland but will be proud to have played a small part in her success.
"I definitely do owe my Grandad a lot for this," she said. "If he hadn't given Dad the shotgun I would never have got into this sport and they've supported me all the way along this journey so without them none of this would have happened."
Her sudden emergence as a Commonwealth champion may finally cast the attention onto a new breed of up and coming Australian shooters after years of Olympic champions Michael Diamond and Russell Mark being the big names in the sport.
"We've got a great bunch of fairly young shooters that are very promising and I'm sure you'll see a couple of them do very well at this Games," Coles said.
