Bananaman wrote: »

Can we please have an informed debate on the matter - rather than petty childish slagging and have the thread devolve into something useless.

It's not petty childish slagging B'man, it's pointing out that the NASRPC is currently running FISA, the body that replaced the SSAI on the FCP, and that since you hold a position with them, you're not exactly standing up as an individual here.

I have no vested interest

See, that's the kind of thing that, given the above point, makes me question the good faith of the rest of your post.

I want to see an end to the rot which has seen our sports under continuous sustained attack, both from within and without, since I have taken up the sport.

And that's the kind of thing, that, given the above point, makes me wonder how short and falliable you think our memories are.

I do think there needs to be an interface between the Shooting Sports, The Gardai and the Dept of Justice on Firearms licensing.
However, that should be a two way street where the concerns of the grass roots shooters, the problems of all firearms owners, range operators, club committees, sports administrators etc. and the concerns of the Gardai are all on the agenda.

You have just described the FCP.

Here's the problem - most shooters seem to think the FCP is a lobbying group which exists to lobby for the interests of shooters.

Except that it's not.

What it is, is the place our lobbying groups go to in order to argue their case and be involved in the process so as to prevent the more ludicrous suggestions that have come in over the years (for example, allowing your dentist to testify as to your mental state when you apply for a licence).

It does not give us everything we want. But then again, nothing ever will. As you said yourself, it's where all the interested parties in the Firearms Acts go to, not just shooters, but the Gardai and others. And they will have their own arguments, and we won't win every point in there.

However, while it has those limits, it also has several advantages:

• Anything that comes out of the FCP has the Minister's blessing. By default. In comparison, anything that comes out of the courts requires a Minister's signature to overwrite in an instant, and I can give you examples all day if you so wish.
• It's free. In comparison, the courts cost five and six figure sums depending on which court the case goes to and how long the case lasts - and the NARGC is no longer underwriting cases financially for shooters, so that cost comes from the pockets of individuals - and for those who believe that shooters always win, and that having costs awarded to you means you pay nothing, there's a rather rude awakening awaiting the unwary should they pursue a case like this and lose.
• It's faster than the courts. Cases in the courts can drag on for years - we've had cases that took the guts of a decade to get to a final judgement. The FCP isn't going to be the next spectator sport, but doesn't take a decade to resolve one case at least.
• It's official recognition from the Government that the shooting community has a role to play in its own legislation. For those who don't remember, we never, ever had that prior to the FCP. Occasionally, an NGB might get a meeting or two at the Minister's whim; but so did any other group or individual. The FCP affords us, as a community, a status we didn't have and should be loath to lose.
• It makes us a known quantity to everyone involved. In case you're wondering why that would be useful, remember that the AGS have a fairly conservative outlook on life and we see that in nearly every decision and policy they make on firearms. The DoJ were similarly orientated prior to the FCP, as quite a few people will remember.

Indeed none of those items are on the agenda - the proof is in the pudding - i could spend all day listing the examples of a lack of consultation - a few choice ones that affect huge numbers of people.

Shall we examine these examples?

• Crazy drafts of Range SIs doing the rounds - obviously without any ranges having been consulted.
  
  Except that those drafts are (a) drafts, (b) being circulated - or were while the SSAI was in the FCP, and (c) being edited based on shooters input.
  
• Patently incorrect definitions in the legislation such as the definition of a Bullpup - obviously without any shooters having been consulted.
  
  Find me one country, anywhere in the world, that has (a) a working legislature, and (b) nothing but correct definitions in its law.
  
  And the definition is "rifles with a magazine located behind the trigger". Now, I've only been shooting for a decade or two B'man, but that to me isn't incorrect. In fact, it's pretty much the definition most of us would use. Not very detailed, I'll grant you, but what's wrong with it exactly?
  
• Daft restrictions in the legislation such as 5 shot limits on rimfire pistols - obviously without anyone with knowledge having been consulted.
  
  No, people were consulted. And they protested and said it was daft. But it's not just the shooting bodies in the FCP, it's also groups with other agendas and this was a point we lost.
  Mind you, we won it the first time round.
  And the SI needs to be updated again, so it's not lost forever... unless we're not in the FCP and thus unable to effect changes.
  
• Crazy boundaries such as calibre defining a restricted rifle - .308 not restricted .38 restricted - obvioulsy without anyone with knowledge having been consulted.
  
  Actually, an NASRPC person who shoots gallery rifle was there on the FCP at the time - you know him better than me, why not ask him why this happened?
  
• The Increased workload applied to the Gardai to deal with a new licensing system, not designed with implementation in mind.
  
  Yup. Nobody happy about that.
  However, that came in in the 2006 firearms act, which was drafted before the FCP was set up. Maybe if the FCP had existed before then, we could have dodged this one, because we'd have been able to talk with the AGS directly. (We have no mechanism to do this outside of the FCP).
  
• Not including core aspects of the firearms licensing, such as hunting, in the new process.
  
  Yes, I'm not sure how the NARGC missed that one.

I am sure the petitions authors

Author.
There's just me B'man, doing this on my own, deliberately avoiding the NGBs because this is a grassroots petition.

will claim that there was but I know that if I was "consulted" on some of these matters and my opinion was ignored I would be quite vocal in informing those I represented that I had, and by association, they had, been ignored.

B'man, your NGB - the one you hold a position in and aren't just an ordinary member of - sits on the FCP right now representing other sports. How much communication has there been between you and the NRAI, the Pony Club, the ITS and the NSAI about what you're going to discuss with the Department through the FCP channels?

Bananaman wrote: »

Your reply is a bit nit picky and started a lot of irrelevant and distracting tangents but you asked a few questions and raised a few points so I'll answer it.

Okay, stop there.
You took a fairly straightforward grassroots petition and asked some questions about it from what, frankly, I think is not a good faith position.
I answered all your questions.
And that's "nit picky"?
If I'm picking nits here B'man, they're your nits, not mine. Creating a mess and then blaming someone who tries to fix it isn't really a very ethical method for discussing something.

I do not see the FCP as somewhere that the shooting community goes to Lobby.

And yet, that is what it is.

If, I for one, want to have a representative group to lobby - I will want to elect it.
Rather than having it be a group hand picked by those it will lobby on our behalf which smacks a bit too much of foxes guarding the hen house.

Except that that's not how it worked.

• Shooters voted on their NGB committees at their NGB's AGMs.
• Those NGBs outside the SSAI then nominated their representatives to the FCP.
• Those NGBs in the SSAI in turn then nominated the SSAI rep to the FCP.

That is the system drafted by the man the NASRPC appointed as a spokesperson. When drafted, it was a fair, open, honest and democratic process, but when it transpired that those bodies elected someone other than himself to sit on that board, suddenly the rules weren't right or fair or open or honest or democratic.

So you'll have to understand that when I hear that complaint coming from the NASRPC's direction, I have to ask myself, "He's got his seat, what more does he want?"

And as we can all see they have produced a less than stellar performance.
The licensing régime is a complete disaster but I suppose in someones report somewhere, it is a disaster that was very well introduced.

Well, that's your opinion.

Mine, however, differs.

It's my opinion that the system now in place works for over 99% of the applicants, and while it's definitely not as shooter-friendly as it should be, and while I have serious problems with large chunks of it, most of those chunks came in with the '06 Act.

And the FCP didn't show up until AFTER the '06 Act.

And it was the NASRPC's current spokesperson who was "negotiating" with the Powers that Be before the '06 Act on behalf of the NRPAI. And he thought the '06 Act was Great. We had huge rows about it here and elsewhere, if you recall, because we all saw how bad it was and what was coming.

And, while the current system still needs fixing, the system we would have today were it not for the FCPs efforts would be far, far worse.

• No pistols, at all.
• Six or seven medical personnel being on the list of people who could testify as to your fitness to hold a firearm, including your dentist, anyone in an A&E ward, and a few others who aren't qualified to testify on mental fitness of any kind.
• The JSP standard in place for range certification (you know, the one that says you have to be able to fire 20mm cannon and anti-tank weapons on the range) for all ranges, even the airgun-only and smallbore-only ones.

And a host of other smaller abominations.

You say it's a disaster, but you ignore what caused the current problems and what's been preventing them from being worse, and how bad they would have been. That doesn't make for a soundly researched opinion to my mind.

The fact that is is one of the most challenged pieces of legislation in the history of the state is testament alone to that.

It's actually never been challanged.

There are decisions of garda superintendents being challanged more than ever before, citing the Firearms Act as proof that they made their decisions incorrectly, but the legislation itself has not been challanged. Except via the FCP, and even there the large-scale structure of the '06 Act is a monster problem to even look at.

When attempting to debunk the few examples I used you consistently referred to groups other than the FCP, such as the NASRPC or the NARGC, but we have already said that whereas people may well have been a part of one or more of those associations when the FCP was formed, they were not asked to be part of it because of who they represented but because of who they were.

Actually, everyone who was put on the FCP in the beginning was elected by their NGB to represent that NGB.

And I mention those groups because sending a rep to the FCP did not mean that you ceased to be - it meant that your NGB could present its position at the FCP. There was no guarantee that you'd get all you wanted, there never was. But a lot more often than not, our sides won their arguments, or at least blunted the worst of those they didn't win.

That has been proven by the fact that some of those individuals still hold their positions on the FCP, having been removed from their positions in the associations you claim they represent and, in fact, do not represent any one at all.

That's between one individual and your organisation B'man.
If he wants to give his side of things, I'd love to hear it because the details never made it out of the NASRPC to the wider world as far as I know.

You also seem to be comparing the FCP to the courts or as an alternative to the courts. That is folly.

You've just cited court cases yourself above.
Others, in other places, have cited the courts as a better alternative to the FCP - including NASRPC officers.

And if we leave the courts aside, there is no other available format for the FCP and no will on the part of the Minister to close down the FCP and make the FCP2 out of whole cloth to suit one sub-set of the FCP's members.

So, either we compare it to the courts, or we compare it to howling in the wilderness, because those are the available options.

I find the arguments "for" to be a bit thin

And I find your position makes no logical sense at all given what you've said so far.

Simply put:

• We had thirty years of not talking to the Department or Minister officially. We got nothing as a result. So that's not a viable option.
  
• Then we tried court cases for a decade. And the one we took all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every step along the way over several years and lots of man-hours and money, was overruled by the Minister with one paragraph in the back of a Miscellaneous section of a convenient bill. So that's not a viable option (not for changing the system anyway - the courts can make people adhere to the system, but if the system's broken, they're useless). By the way, we've now lost two Supreme Court cases. Care to guess at the cost or where the money to pay for that came from or - and this is the real long-term nightmare - what the damage those precedents set will do to our sport for the next several decades? Court precedents never go away. We've seen law from the 1300s cited in Irish court cases in the last thirty years. So not only is every case we take a risk for today if we lose, it's a risk whose consequences we have to live with essentially forever.
  
• And then there's a common forum chaired by the Department where everyone is represented to discuss this stuff and sort out a cheaper, faster, more permanent solution.

That last one is called the FCP.

It's the best option we've ever had and it's now set to go away and set us back a decade in terms of involvement in our own legislation, right after that legislation has been so horribly mangled.

Letting it go away would be a really bad outcome for all our sports. One we'll be regretting for decades if it happens.

...and split out so as not to clutter up the sticky...

Tackleberrywho wrote: »

I for one
DO NOT want an Eletist group of Target shooters representing 200000+ of us.

Small hint, target shooters don't actually want to represent 200,000 of us; even if the IFA and NARGC wanted them to.

5 round mag in a pistol/revolver is a joke.

Yes, but not one from the pen of a target shooter.
And the fastest way to fix it is via the FCP.

Air rifles should be not considered Rifles unless they break 8ft/lb.

Not that I'm arguing, but do you not mean 12 ft/lb?

Then that would also mean that these people who shoot them would no longer be on the FCP or similar though...

Sure, unless they shot other things...
...or were covered by the FCP's remit in other ways, the way that airsoft is right now (they're not firearms, but there's lots in the Firearms Act about how they can be sold and used and so on).

So will we see Deer Hunters, Game shooters, Clay shooters, Vermin controllers, target shooters all represented on this new FCP or what ever new lettering it is given?

No, because there won't be a new FCP. There's no will to create one. If we let this one go to the wall, the response will be "Oh. You didn't want it? Okay, see you round". And then we'll have another few decades of wading through a mire of problems that could have been resolved more quickly, more effectively and more inexpensively than any other option available if we'd only kept the FCP.

Bananaman wrote: »

If the FCP, with a wave of its wand, can fix it, then, why is there a 5 shot restriction on unrestricted rimfire handguns?

It cannot fix anything as quickly as Sooty can.
Away from children's TV programmes, however, the 5-shot restriction came from the AGS as I understand it, and while that argument wasn't won, please remember the context in which it was happening.

If you try to appraise the FCP by comparing having no limits and having a 5-round limit, yeah, it looks bad.

If, however, you remember that at the time the Minister had just announced in public that ALL handguns were about to be banned, and then note that the FCP were able to get enough wiggle room to keep as much as it did - and would have had enough to keep even more had people not gotten shouty for precisely the wrong thirty seconds - well, that's a slightly more accurate picture of what was going on and frankly, it's one that the FCP doesn't look so bad in, is it?

Why will it be better able to do it once it itself has a future - if its for the good of the shooting sports then surely their future should come before its own

B'man, I think you're operating here under a misconception.
You believe that the FCP is a single entity, a group with its own identity and agenda.
You are mistaken. It is not. It is an avenue by which multiple groups can communicate on specific issues.

Some of those groups don't think much of private ownership of firearms and have an official avenue of communication to the Minister already. They will not lose out if we lose the FCP.

We, however, have no such alternate avenue. If we lose the FCP, we are basicly ****ed for the next decade.

Bananaman wrote: »

You said the FCP was the best way to fix the error whereby there is a 5 shot restriction on unrestricted rimfire handguns

Yup, it's an amendment to the restricted list SI, there's several others needed as well, and the FCP is the obvious route for that because they've done several other SIs already.

Then you said they can do it but cannot do it quickly.

No B'man, I said they can't do it as quickly as Sooty can wave his magic wand on a children's tv show.

The FCP have been around a few years now, as has that error. Yet there has been no change, nor attempts at it, as far as I know.
Despite it being a massive problem for shooters and that having been communicated to the FCP since it was formed.
Which is it? They can do it or not?

Seriously, that's your argument?
Yes, they can do it.
No, they haven't done it yet.
Why, because there's a list of things they had to do.
Should it have been a priority, well not so much, because the Clubs and Ranges SIs had far more potential to destroy everyone's sports, in one go.

This is the thing B'man - it's a forum where everyone's sport goes to, not just a subset. So yes, it's a stupid restriction, and we wouldn't have it in an ideal world (but frankly, given the time it came in at it could have been far worse), and yes, it should be changed, but it came after other things in the triage list, because those things would have ended shooting alltogether.

Given that at the moment there are at least three groups that need changes in that SI rather badly however, I'd say it's a tad further up the list right now.



Oh, and before you say that this is typical or that it shows the FCP doesn't really care, please pause for a moment and reflect on the point that when you selected something to change in the restricted list SI, you picked the 5-shot limit on smallbore pistol magazines.

And ignored centerfire pistols entirely. Because altering the restricted list SI is the means by which those can most easily be brought back. And they're completely banned, not just inconvenienced right now.

And you ignored pistol-caliber gallery rifles.

And you ignored paintball.

All of these (and a few others) are interested parties in the firearms act and meant to be equal partners on the FCP, but you ignored their needs in favour of your own. Now that's not me ragging on you - that's me trying to point out that you're criticising others for doing poorly (in your estimation) what you're not even trying to do at all.

Bananaman wrote: »

Smallbore pistols are in the same boat as Centrefire Pistols.

Really? Virtually banned outright you mean?

Most smallbore pistol sports are 6 shot based - most smallbore pistols are 10 shot - most smallbore revolvers are 6 or 10 shot - yet a 6 shot handgun is restricted, therefore not allowed. Absolutely bananas.

Ah, I see, you mean "mildly inconvenienced compared to what was publicly stated to be on the way by the Minister".

The obvious intention was to destroy the smallbore pistol sports.

This was at the time when the Minister went to the public and said "I WILL BAN ALL HANDGUNS" on the front page of every paper of the day. So, incisive analysis there B'man. However, we still have air and smallbore pistols, grandfathered centerfire pistols, and a route to get centerfire pistols back that doesn't require us to go via the Dail, and existing centerfire pistols to demonstrate to recalcitrant gardai and an ignorant public that they're not weapons of mass destruction.

Is it what we would design for ourselves if we had carte blanche to draft any rules we wanted? Don't be an asshat, of course it's not.

Is it the best we could hope for when the Minister had announced to the press that a ban was coming in, the law had to bounce through the AG's office a dozen times before getting to go to the Dail where every numpty from a back bench who was trying to get airtime wanted to push amendments on it had a turn, and then the same deal in the Seanad, whilst all the time the media was feeding the Deasy-v-Ahern row? Yes. Welcome to the Ireland and Irish politics B'man, where nobody ever gets what they want, unless they're a Taoiseach, and if you can get a compromise that everyone's unhappy with, you've come as close to winning as the system permits.

Or had you some other way to do this that nobody's ever thought of or tried in the last four decades? Because if so, spit it out. Tell us what your alternative is, and how you plan to bell that cat.