Sparks wrote: »

I don't care how perfect the Bill you draft is, the Oireachtas will do to it what your digestive system does to a five-star michelin meal prepared by the finest chef in the best restaurant in the world, and what comes out the other end in both cases will bear a striking resemblance to each other.

Finian McGrath wrote:

When talking about crime and the proceeds of crime, as I mentioned earlier, we also need to think about the issue of firearms. There is significant a public safety concern among broader society about the availability of firearms, both legal and illegal. According to recent research done by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality, there are around 150,000 unregistered firearms. I am not talking about the responsible gun owners and the sensible people. I am talking about unregistered firearms. It is important to mention the threat to broader society. Between 2005 and 2008, 31 handguns were stolen and 1,236 other civilian firearms were stolen. Of the 1,236 firearms, only 373 were recovered. We need to be focused, and responsible gun owners need to be vigilant.
They need to be careful. We need strong regulation and commonsense when dealing with this issue because we have enough guns in the broader society, a fact which must be recognised.

Grizzly 45 wrote: »

the renewal of licenses for small calibre .22 handguns for target shooting, which are currently licensed, and have been for the past two licensing periods, will be unlawfully refused.

However, we are concerned that we have heard nothing further from the Minister and/or her officials in advance of her visit to the range. There has been no response to our proposal nor an indication of a wish to even discuss it. The Sports Coalition is concerned that this silence may indicate a decision already made to implement draconian measures and that the range visit is simply ‘window dressing’.

We therefore ask all members of all associations and clubs to immediately again contact their TD’s and Senators (especially those from Fine Gael and Labour) to:

Impress upon her that the absence of engagement is giving rise to suspicion and therefore pressure from members for the Coalition to become more pro-active in the defence of the members’ interests and to accept the support of the RISE Campaign in the run-up to the General Election.

C) Tell the TD’s and Senators that in response to the concerns of its collective member, the Sports Coalition has found it necessary to meet with its legal advisors last week to discuss a contingency in the event that any currently licensed firearms are capped or banned. Tell them that a cap or ban of any currently licensed firearm will be regarded as a hostile act and will not be accepted.

D) Tell the TD’s and Senators to impress upon the Minister that the proposal for settlement which we have submitted is the only one which will resolve all matters and bring all litigation to an end thereby bringing certainty to the licensing process without compromising public safety and this has been confirmed by the Sports Coalition’s legal advisors.

We again need everyone’s assistance to keep this matter moving. We cannot allow it to be ‘kicked down the road’ until after an election.

That point should be made very firmly and that there is a feeling developing that there are behind the scenes moves to try to ‘con’ the shooting community.

clawback07 wrote: »

I don't understand the benefit of long fingering the issue until after the next election ,what advantage is there in doing that ?

Sparks wrote: »

What you might also want to ruminate on for a bit is that with actual gun crime levels a political hot potato, we don't want to see a Firearms Bill anytime soon; because every single backbench TD and Senator is going to want to be seen to be speaking about "the issue of the day" on Oireachtas Report, what with a General Election coming up sometime in the next two years. Which means that, even if it was the perfect unicorn of a well-written Firearms Bill at the first stage in the Dail (and it won't be, it'll be a mess); by the time the Lowrys, the Healy-Reas, the Mullens, most of the Sinn Fein TDs (don't ask me why, but that party has a really odd track record when it comes to making the Firearms Act an unwieldy mess), the Greens and the Deasys had had their way with it, it'd be a dog's breakfast and we'd be the ones stuck with it.

Sparks wrote: »

I've sat through two full cycles of that now. Not only will it make everything worse, it'll take ages and be mangled by every backbench attention-seeker in the dail and seanad...

Besides, we already know the first thing we need to do with the firearms act is push for a restatement of it, with absolutely no changes. Because right now, there are maybe three or four dozen people in the entire country who have a working understanding of the act, and none of those have a working understanding of the entire act (though they've no call to since it covers not only our stuff but the stuff you see used in criminal trials as well). I suppose it could be worse, it used to barely be a dozen at one point. But that's not because it's written in latin, it's because it's spread over 20 or so acts, dozens of SIs and then of course the non-legislative guidelines and so forth. All that has to get read into the one document, so we have one single definitive act and know where we stand; until that point, trying to fix what's broken is a fool's errand (especially since you'll need to do it after you've fixed everything anyway). There's a reason that both the law reform commission and the most reactionary high court justice I know about have both been saying the same thing about this for years - because it's an obvious, yet easily solvable problem...

Sparks wrote: »

The last thing we need is to start from scratch. I mean, we don't even have scratch or square one or whatever you want to call it.

We need a restatement of the firearms act into one single document.
We need a revisit to the restricted firearms SI to fix it so that activities like answering the phone for a paintball field isn't a criminal act punishable by seven years in prison and twenty grand of fines.
Then we'll be at square one. And getting those two is about four years of hard work right there.

...

Changing legislation is a long, tedious, anonymous, unsexy, thankless, expensive, tiring and fustrating process, where you have to deal with everyone from the Firearms Unit of the DoJ, to Garda HQ to the Minister to the AG's office (and you'll go from DoJ to AG a lot - twenty or thirty times) to the backbenchers in the Dail and Seanad who want to be in the papers, to the AGS themselves when they implement it.

And that's the people who aren't trying to undermine your work from within the shooting community because they don't like you or don't like someone you're working with or haven't had their morning ego stroke yet, or who just want to f*ck about because apparently that's more fun than actually shooting for them.

Ten years of my life I spent doing this, along with a dozen or two others, and even reading the idea of looking at it being done again when so few people actually know what's involved is enough to make me want a stiff drink.

Sparks wrote: »

The problem here with talking about changes is this:
No matter how perfect your proposed changes are, and no matter how high the fidelity between your idea and the Bill that the Minister lays before the Dail (and no matter how little mangling the AG's office did to it before that point), every backbencher with an interest in getting into the press ahead of the upcoming General Election is going to want to tweak it so they can get into the media as helping to stem the gun crime problem. Won't matter if their idea's good or bad (though past experience says it'll be woeful), they'll want the air time to help keep their seats because every politico is eyeing the next election the way a postman eyes a rottweiller.

This is the problem with trying to drive through large or complex changes in the law. You want to do it as little as possible, and you want it as tightly scoped as possible and you want to do it in as quiet a time as possible. Otherwise, you start off with a good idea and end up with a rats-nest of a nightmare on your hands.

Sparks wrote: »

The proposals to increase the sentences? They probably will. Those wouldn't worry me. It's what else might get proposed that would cause the problem - you start off with a simple goal of getting to one single readable firearms act, and then every backbencher looking to get into the papers shows up to committee stage with "just this small idea that'll fix everything" (Really Deputy? Spent twenty years in the sport, have you? Know what the current law is? No? But you think you can fix the law without knowing what it is or anything about what it regulates? Seriously? Go home Deputy McGrath...)

That's what happened the last few times we've done this dance...

Sparks wrote: »

There is absolutely no way that the Firearms Act is getting fixed because of this. Even if the will was there to put the resources into that, even if you could get people to go along with it instead of eating half the resources with useless shouting and tablebanging, even if you could get the drafts through the AGs office without them mangling clear text into legalese that didn't mean the same thing, even if the Minister let us draft the law without the other shareholders having an equal say, even if this hypothetical draft made it to the floor of the Dail, you would then have every backbench TD facing annihilation in the next election looking to use it to get into the media the way we've seen Finian McGrath do of late.

Sparks wrote: »

We keep talking about what changes would be best.

The problem is that any changes would have to go through the Oireachtas, and that means that not only would you have to get a Bill drafted despite the opposition of certain parties in the Gardai, and despite all the help from the Attorney General's office, and all the supervision from the Justice department; but you then have to see that Bill go through a Dail full of backbench TDs in the months before an election when they are desperate to get media attention.

I don't care how perfect the Bill you draft is, the Oireachtas will do to it what your digestive system does to a five-star michelin meal prepared by the finest chef in the best restaurant in the world, and what comes out the other end in both cases will bear a striking resemblance to each other.

J.R. wrote: »

http://nargc.ie/letter-sent-to-both-houses-on-24th-of-june-2015/

yubabill1 wrote: »

If proposals are unfavourable, we must stick together, despite our differences.