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To day was our clubs last full bore shoot this year I brought this subject up none of them new what I was talking about.

Alpha1 wrote:To day was our clubs last full bore shoot this year I brought this subject up none of them new what I was talking about.

Not surprised at all. aaarggh

This happened to me just yesterday with one of the biggest clubs in my area.

If the governing bodies cannot even reach the grass roots and then mobilise then what is the hope for the sport...

The national bodies are failing the sport... and do not be deserved to be called national..

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The stolen 50-cal used to justify the UK ban was recovered by police
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8 Nov 17 – The minister publicly driving the 50-cal ban has confessed to Parliament that the one stolen rifle which prompted the latest drive to ban 50-cal rifles was, in fact, recovered by police.


Nick Hurd MP, the Conservative Home Office minister steering the 50-cal and MARS bans through Parliament, admitted in a Parliamentary answer that no 50-cal rifles have been used in crime in the UK.

He added that the one “criminal incident” involving a 50-cal rifle was a theft, and added that the firearm “was subsequently recovered”.

Police lobby agency NABIS’ “chief scientist”, Martin Parker, was tasked to find a way of banning 50-calibre rifles by the police Firearms and Explosives Licensing Working Group. FELWG is the police group which decides what firearms laws will say and how they are enforced and interpreted. It stopped publishing meeting minutes when its parent company, ACPO, rebranded itself as the College of Policing, in order to evade an order from Theresa May that the unaccountable ACPO private business, owned for personal gain by senior police constables, was to be shut down.

Parker was given this job in the wake of the Paris mass murders of 2015, which was the trigger for the EU gun ban.

NABIS, the National Ballistic Intelligence Service, presents itself to the public as a ballistics lab that analyses bullets and firearms misused by criminals. In reality, NABIS is a police weapon deployed to secure changes in firearms laws targeting the licensed firearms community. It uses its pseudo-scientific approach to browbeat civil servants and politicians into changing the law and making it harder for legitimate shooters and collectors to enjoy their peaceful hobbies. NABIS works hand-in-glove with the dozen or so Home Office civil servants whose specialism is firearms law.

NABIS is responsible for recent changes to laws on antique firearms, which the Home Office itself confessed will save a theoretical one life per year. Fewer than 10 people have been shot dead through the misuse of antique firearms over the past ten years; all of these were criminal gang members.

And no body in my main shooting club knows anything about the proposed ban. I despair I really do.

TBH if you are "older" and don't use the internet that much how are you going to know. There has been nothing in the press about the ban.
I know there is a "community" in most clubs but you often find each discipline will keep themselves to themselves and often there is a disconnect between them.
Even the "social" boys have been pretty quiet. I expected Callum Long Collins to go into turbo bat sh*t crazy mode over this but I think he put out one video and that's it. If people like that don't get on board then I think there is no chance.

Amusing shooting news article. Says not even the "internet people" are bothered about the ban, yet there is 74 pages here and I have not seen one single person say they support the proposed ban??

Lancs_Oakley wrote:TBH if you are "older" and don't use the internet that much how are you going to know. There has been nothing in the press about the ban.
I know there is a "community" in most clubs but you often find each discipline will keep themselves to themselves and often there is a disconnect between them.

This is the sad truth.

The best we could have hoped for is for the BASC, NRA etc. to have sent a letter through the post to all it's members and to all club secretaries asking for the situation to be communicated to everyone they know. It would have cost them a some printing and postage. In turn, that could have generated a significant additional number of letters being written to MPs.

I've had no letters through the post.

BASC has 150,000 members and I'd wager that the vast majority of those are sporting SGC/FAC holders rather than target shooters.
The NRA UK has 23,000 members.
The CPSA has 15,000 members
The NSRA has around 5000.

In the UK there are 153,600 FAC's and 582,500 SGC's (some will have both)

Its clear to me that the big organisations are hardly scratching the surface of the shooting population in the UK.