Another long one, actually a really long one so strap in.

Kevin Irving wrote: »

I've been careful to continuously differentiate between careless vs. conscientious owners.

No, in fact you have specifically said they are one and the same. In case you forgot your previous posts:

I think they’re very much related. Opportunistic crime thrives on carelessness.

Whether an opportunistic teenager finds it in the hallway, or a hardened criminal cuts a safe from the wall, the end result is the same.

whether due to negligence, or targeting by criminals, guns keep falling into criminal hands

No distinction there.

As far as I can work out, you're far more keen to align yourself with anyone at all who owns a firearm, than you are to call out (the very few) irresponsible owners.

I'm a firearm owner, member and Moderator of the shooting forum and you're surprised i would defend my sport and safety record of one of the oldest sports in the country. Shocker.

As for calling anyone out, well as soon as someone posts on this forum with their illegal activity believe me i'll be the first to call them on it.

You're way off the mark here - please quote where I've said it's a pattern. I know they were isolated incidents.

Your incessant repetition of the two stories as though this constituted a pattern within the shooting community.

Nevertheless, when I even dare to talk about a negative experiences I've had (among other positive ones I must add),

You have not once mentioned the "positive" ones instead focusing on the two stories you claim happened.

you're more interested in discrediting what I had to say rather than take it at face value and even consider that someone may have had a lapse of judgment.

I was more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt however your tone, pushing the narrative towards the two claimed experiences, and a seeming agenda to link negligence to criminal acts have used up any leeway i was willing to give.

I also do not comment on unsubstantiated stories from your youth/past.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense to me. If they've gone to the trouble steal ammo, may as well take the gun too.

Mu opinion, NOT fact so please don't take this as Gospel, its not. Again i'm not a criminal so its only a SWAG.

As you say, absolute zero is a fallacy, and yet within that group of 160,000, there are zero careless owners?

Law of probability would say no, but again i cannot comment on things i do not know. Everyone i know, speak to and interact with both in real life and on this forum have the same level of conscientiousness, and dare i say duty, when it comes to firearm safety, security, handling, possession and usage.

As i said before the costs (financial and time) involved in being a firearm owner is not insignificant. No one goes into it with a "blase" attitude. Anyone that has even a hint of such an attitude soons learns quickly that An Gardaí and the shooting community as a whole take the matter very seriously and look unfavourably on anyone that brings the sport into disrepute.

Again with the sly discreditation, you know full well I can't prove it years after the fact.

I'll tell you why, its because of the implied tone. I understand the written word has no context and/or tone, but your laser focus on the two stories are showing through an implied agenda. Couple that with the lack of detail, vague accounting of the events leading to the supposed incidents and the aftermath leave us with an air of skepticism.

Once again, and this is NOT tinfoil hat territory, you must understand that our sport has sustained "attack" after "attack" from all corners simply because we use a firearm instead of a hurl or racket (as said before). I've given you some examples of how the legitimate sport of shooting has come under attack from those that claim to be animal right supporters, from An Gardaí, from the Dept of Justice, from ordinary people who believe all guns ar bad (m'kay), and the list goes on.

We have had legislative changes made to our sport based on the actions of criminals such as with poor Shane's murder, mass shootings in America or other European countries, and none of which has ever happened in Ireland in over 170 years or official shooting sports.

I don't actually see anything much wrong with the first incident apart from the easily accessibility of the gun.

From where? What i mean is how do you know the person was able to get to the firearm easily? What if they were out shooting with it just before, or cleaning it, or carrying out repairs.

Given the current epidemic of the Chinese virus i've spent a lot of time in my gun room cleaning my various firearms, removing scopes, checking various things, going through my equipment, etc. So chances are at some point during the day i may have a firearm out of the safe. I am breaking no laws.

As for the farmer, maybe he thought we were checking the place out, maybe he thought it was funny, I've no idea.

I cannot really comment on that for many reasons not least of which is i don't know the circumstances or if it happened but mainly because we have a rule on this forum that there is no discussion of RKBA (Right to Keep Bear & Arms) as it's an American ideology and illegal in Ireland.

I get that as community representative, you have to nail your colours to the mast on this one, but come on, do you really think that any law in this country is adhered to 100%?

I don't worry myself about every law in this country and for the purposes of discussion on this forum i only concern myself with the discussion of laws relating to shooting.

Shooting sports is older than the GAA, did you know that? We have a safer record than any other sport with zero deaths and single digit injuries over decades of shooting. All of this is self policed for the most part. I say for the most part as the law sets out what we can and cannot do, and due to the nature of shooting sports its up to each person to make sure they do it right as An Gardaí cannot properly police it. Its an administrative impossibility.

More regular posters to this forum have even mentioned themselves about knowing people who store guns under the bed, and yet you flat out refuse to acknowledge this even happens - because the law says it shouldn't.

I don't refuse to accept it, i simply never witnessed such acts. Without witnessing them i cannot say with any sort of certainty that they do or that they are somehow regular. There is a difference between listening to someone say something and believing it happened.

I can't say it enough times, I don't have any issue with firearms whatsoever., or their owners as a group. None. I was just interested in the actual situation around storage and theft of firearms. Thank you for your answers on that front, honestly.

Your welcome.

However, it is ironic that you mention distrust, and then immediately call me a liar.

From the off i was content with discussing this with you, but as the discussion went on a tone emerged, possibly on my end too, and the conversation took a different direction. So for my end i apologise.

However i still take issue with the two supposed incidents you mention. One is a sleepwalking incident as a kid and the other while walking as a teen.

In the first case:
Where the hell were you that as a kid, under 12, someone thought you enough of a threat to point a gun at you. How did you know it was a licensed firearm? This assertion implies you know the person involved. If you know the person, then its safe to assume they know you and that you sleepwalk. So why would they point at firearm at you? Then to the question of where were you sleepwalking? If it was in the house of the person you know then why would they be so nervous about a child walking through the house, presumably at night, who has a history of sleepwalking?

In the second case:
While as a teenager, just walking down a road. As another poster said, i've been around a good few years and never had this happen to me, not once, whether i was carrying a firearm myself or not. So where were you that this happened to you? Was it a driveway or farm/private land that you should not have been on in the first place? When was it? Night or day? Why did you not inform An Gardai or even your parents so that they could deal with it themselves or through An Gardaí?

Do you see why i'm/we're so skeptical of such terse statements. Without more info or some context they're meaningless and made to look sensationalist and a common occurrence rather than the isolated incident it may have been.

It's not surprising that an us vs. them mentality develops if that's how new posters are treated,

Such an attitude does exist, for the reasons i outlined above. However it comes, from our side, from years of having to defend a 100% legal sport from those that wish to see an end to all shooting regardless whether its fieldsport, or competitive in nature.

If you want more look at how the press treat us. In the same year Derval O'Rouke came fourth in a HEAT, still missing out on an actual place in the final of a race, a contingent of Irish sportsmen/women won dozens of medals in a world shooting competition in Germany and not one paper would cover them or their success, even after we contacted them to ask if they would.

On Prime Time, on two occasions, sports shooting representative were interviewed and when the programme went to air the footage was edited/cut to cast us in a bad light and in one particular episode Miriam O'Callaghan could not hide her contempt or bias towards the shooting representatives and cut them off mid sentence, dismissed their points as "bamboozling" the viewers.

We've even had An Gardaí link legal gun owners to criminality by suggestive and carefully worded press briefings. Showing seized gangland weapons and suggesting they could have been stolen. An Gardaí have access to PULSE and a quick check would show if they were stolen, but as they did not say this it meant the firearms were not stolen from legally held owners, but instead of clarifying this point it was left purposely vague.

Within two weeks of the senseless and violent murder of Shane Geoghegan in 2008 the Minister for Justice implemented a host of new laws that came into, retrospective, effect in June 2009. It made some firearms illegal, and destroyed an entire section of the sport. When questioned about it afterwards the Minister admitted it would have zero impact on criminal shootings but the press ran with the story of "thousands of the guns taken off the streets".

So called animal rights activists have taken pictures from this very site and photoshopped axes and other instruments into the pictures to make it seem that we club animals to death and are intentionally cruel. It made us have to change the rules of the forum so people would post pictures with watermarks or the firearm across the animal so it could not be photoshopped out. The same "activists" have criminal records, history of violence, and have caused untold devastation to local flora/fauna by releasing farmed animals such as Mink without any forethought or knowledge as to the consequences. They also never acknowledge the hundreds of thousands if not millions of Euro spent by the shooting community on conservation programs, necessary cullings, etc. that is from our own pockets.

albeit ones with different options. May as well se the forum to private and keep out anyone with genuine questions.

This forum, as with all public forums, are monitored. That is not hearsay, speculation or even conspiracy theory as posts on this forum have appeared in various articles relating to firearms over the years in various media and official documents even so far as Oireachtas meetings. We have been told outright that the forum is monitored.

With that knowledge it would be easy to make it private, but then what have we to hide? Our sport is 100% legal. To hide it away like some dirty secret would only serve to hammer home the already prevailing attitude that we have something to be guilty about or ashamed off. There is no better "disinfectant" for these baseless rumors than the cold light of day. People can come and read or take part in the discussions, but the ofrum is here for those of a similar mindset and the moderators (myself included) are here to make sure that the regular members have somewhere "safe" to discuss their sport without fear of labels or branding from the largely uneducated masses (not intended as an insult, but 99% of people know nothing about the sport).

As was said above why not come along. Its free to visit a range and the people there will embarrass you with their hospitality. They will show you around, explain the basics of the sport, the different types of shooting and different guns used, and if you're up for it the legislation required to be a firearm owner (without boring you to death) and perhaps even allow you to shoot a limited number of firearms (which is legal in Ireland on an authorised range and under supervision of a trained person).

Then you can truly say you have both sides of the story, and can make a more informed decision.