TargetTalk

Well said Sparks, this is very similiar to the Australian context.

Sparks wrote:[Remember, we don't have a second amendment, nor do we have the same governmental setup you do.

And then someone posts the Franklin quote and to those of us who've put in a decade of our lives to the sport despite a lot of problems and obstacles and very little reward, it always, regardless of the good intent of the poster, comes across as smug-git-ness.

Well, firstly you wrongly assume that I'm from the US. Not so, I'm from New Zealand which has a VERY similar proportional representation electorial sytem as your Irish one. Here in NZ, shooters probaly are far less that your 5%. But we haven't given up on lobbying sympathetic ears in parliament, and as result we are cuurently in a reasonably stable position as far as new guns laws are concerned.

If you think my comments are "smug-git-ness" then I'm sorry. I can assure you though, if you allow one type of shooting to be the fall guy, it will bolster the antigunners, and they will gain strength from that sucess. Then they will just keep moving on the next easiest target, eventually little old air pistols come to the top of the list. I form this opinion based on more than 20 years involvement in shooting sports.

j-team wrote:I'm from New Zealand which has a VERY similar proportional representation electorial sytem as your Irish one. Here in NZ, shooters probaly are far less that your 5%. But we haven't given up on lobbying sympathetic ears in parliament, and as result we are cuurently in a reasonably stable position as far as new guns laws are concerned.

I'd hope so if I were you. The reason all this kicked off in Ireland wasn't so much because of a shooting - it was because the worldwide economic crash coupled with a local crash that had started before the worldwide one, had already made the government here highly unpopular and the various Ministers were looking for anything in their baliwicks that would garner them positive press; in our case, it was "doing something about gun crime". The fact that their proposed measures won't do anything about gun crime was seen as utterly irrelevant to the value of the press release announcing that "something would be done". And here we are now. In fact, if we'd not been lobbying for the past while, we'd probably be in worse shape than it looks like we are :(

The fact that our government couldn't afford to buy back guns has saved us in the past!

the closest I ever been to NZ was holding the Sao Paulo consulate's documents for 24hrs and sharing an apartment with a Kiwi, but I think NZ is as different from Ireland as it is from Brazil. (remember figuring how much sheep dung 80 million of them produced, at 50kg ave. and 5%/day...;-))

The size of the country and of the population reduces problems to a very much manageable dimension than those found in Ireland or, worst, in Brazil. So, maybe you have a small percentage of the population shooting, but in a rural scenario weapons are part of life.

You can discuss the subject without becoming a pariah or being shouted down by the left and dogooders. We have a very opposite situation.