Irish Shooting Association ?

SLK2005

Following the discussions on the High court cases on another thread I have become totally disillusioned with the shooting community. We have several branches of shooting in Ireland but they may as well be in another dimension for all the co operation there is between them. It seems that some people have the attitude of "I'm ok I have my gun ". Well you're not ok you're just next on the list for pruning. We should all be grateful for the Nargc for assisting in the recent cases. It was'nt about any one group it was about the Garda handling of the applications of all firearms. I think that there should be one dedicated entity within the shooting community to look after all our intrests ( Irish Rifle Association ):), well call it what you want, similar to the American NRA. Reps from all disciplines should be involved. There should be a full time PRO to counter negitive press and political statements. He/she could advertise shoots, organise charity shoots, show the general public that guns are not a bad thing, educate people. If we dont stand together all types of shooting is at risk and I fear for our future.
What do you think?

Grizzly 45

A lovely thought,but I think the phrase "Too many Cheifs,and not enough Injuns".Will come to mind here,not to mind we already have an "alphabet soup" of organisations supposedly handling each and every facet of shooting in Ireland going by the handy"easily read":D chart Sparks drew up once.
IOW the chances of another organisation surviving and dealing with the Byzanthine and Machevellian world of Irish shooting with its primma donnas,fiefdom builders,me feiners,backstabbers,quitters and every other human vice of personality actually making a difference is as remote as the Clare space programme landing a manned mission on Mars next year.:(
I should also add,money and who gets their paws on it to become the iggest cheif will also have a horrible part to play in this.And where there is money in Ireland......

tac foley

Grizzly 45 wrote: »

A lovely thought,but I think the phrase "Too many Cheifs,and not enough Injuns".Will come to mind here,not to mind we already have an "alphabet soup" of organisations supposedly handling each and every facet of shooting in Ireland going by the handy"easily read":D chart Sparks drew up once.
IOW the chances of another organisation surviving and dealing with the Byzanthine and Machevellian world of Irish shooting with its primma donnas,fiefdom builders,me feiners,backstabbers,quitters and every other human vice of personality actually making a difference is as remote as the Clare space programme landing a manned mission on Mars next year.:(
I should also add,money and who gets their paws on it to become the iggest cheif will also have a horrible part to play in this.And where there is money in Ireland......

You are not helped by having the most labyrinthine and arcane set of easy to misinterpret 'rules' it is possible to imagine. As long as personal interpretation of firearms 'law' [and here I use the term loosely, you understand] is rife within the system, with neither clear-cut terminology to help those who actually license your guns to understand the complexities or, in many cases, the will to even attempt to understand them, you are going to see the continuing fiasco that we've all been looking at for the last many months repeated for the foreseeable future.

tac

Sparks

SLK2005 wrote: »

I think that there should be one dedicated entity within the shooting community to look after all our intrests ( Irish Rifle Association ):), well call it what you want, similar to the American NRA. Reps from all disciplines should be involved. There should be a full time PRO to counter negitive press and political statements. He/she could advertise shoots, organise charity shoots, show the general public that guns are not a bad thing, educate people. If we dont stand together all types of shooting is at risk and I fear for our future.
What do you think?

I think this is one of the longest-running, most-frequently-restarted threads in the forum's history.

• 2004
• 2005
• 2008
• 2008 again

And that's just the dedicated threads - the number of times it's come up in other threads is too many to count.

To summarise the usual answer, it's an idea that can't work. We're not one sport, anymore than tennis and golf are the same because they both use balls. Some of our sports' NGBs are in other umbrella groups like the Pony Club; some cannot be in the one group like the ITS and NTSA because of politics between international governing bodies that we can't control but can't ignore; some frankly don't want to merge because past history going from a few weeks back to a few years back shows that some people can't be worked with and tens of thousands of euros have been lost learning that; some won't merge because they don't see the point in merging (why would the IFA merge with the NASRPC?); and so on.

And this isn't exclusively an Irish problem. No other state in the world today has a single body to govern all shooting sports. The USA does not have a single body to do that; it has the NRA but also a dozen other lobbying bodies alone, many of which hate the NRA and publicly lambast it for various reasons, as does one of its own vice-presidents. That's not much of a role model for unity.

The only solution we've ever thought up was the idea of having a single, independent lobbying group with no sporting authority or funding authority, which purely lobbied as a unified front for shooting. I thought it was a nice idea that would never happen. And then we got something very very close to that, it was called the FCP and then people attacked it at every opportunity because a single independent lobbying body representing everyone doesn't allow for one person to stand at the head of the table and claim all the credit for the things achieved.

So where do we go from here? I don't know. I suspect straight into a wall for a while, that we'll lose some things we have now, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. And in four or five years we might have worked our way back to where we were two or three years back and then someone else will burn it all back down again...

Longranger

I'm going into my happy place! Happy place! Happy place!
I love shooting and have bought two new rifles in the last 3 months and now, reading this thread I'm wondering if I've just pissed away three grand! FFS there has to be something we can do!

Sparks

Longranger wrote: »

I'm going into my happy place! Happy place! Happy place!

Yup, the firing point on the range!

I love shooting and have bought two new rifles in the last 3 months and now, reading this thread I'm wondering if I've just pissed away three grand! FFS there has to be something we can do!

Personally, I think pushing both Minister and NGBs back towards the FCP is the best approach, but that's just me.