Ireland to ban pistols

[Fortitudo Dei]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/fro ... 17220.html

ISSF pistols may be exempt...

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 77,00.html

[McRisible]

If I'm reading these articles correctly, there are currently between 1800 and 1900 licensed handguns in the Irish Republic, in total.

Have any of these been attached to gun crimes? - I'm guessing not, or this fact would likely have been acknowledged.

Are the Gardai actually concerned about licensed handguns, as in implied, or black market guns?

And why is it that every heavy handed piece of legislation in the EU is justified by demonizing the Americans? Any time the wicked Americans are invoked, you can be sure that someone's trying to push a policy that isn't truly justified.

[Fortitudo Dei]

Passionate discussion going on at...
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthre ... 2055422137

[higginsdj]

It never ceases to amaze me how Government 'picks' on the law abiding to throw a vale of 'we are doing something about crime' - Must be because that's the only control they actually have - or its the limit of their vision/ability/concern.

Cheers

David

[bigred]

We've had a shaky couple of days here. Looks at this stage like there is an exemption for Olympic style pistols - read into this .22 and .177 only will be permitted new licences. I'm a bit relieved as he initially looked like banning the whole lot, including .177, which is what I shoot. However there will be new, and extermely onerous security requirements - Monitored Alarm on the property, separate zone for where the gunsafe is, separate monitor on the safe itself potentially. It's not going to be easy, but those of us committed enough will persevere. The big uproar is from the fullbore pistol shooters. They'll be allowed keep what they have, subject to the new security requirements, but will not be allowed licence any further pistols. The details regarding the olympic stuff is yet to be detailed.

[Mike M.]

True. Although I hope that Irish sport shooters can win this one.

A not-quite-thread hijack....what are the laws pertaining to muzzle-loading arms like in Ireland?

[Sparks]

A bit more detail on the situation.

[JulianY]

<RANT>

The bottom line is the politicians need to do something, the public are easy incited , banning sport weapons is a soft target with a fueled public ignorance.

Today in the UK all handguns are banned, and yet according to police statistics (available on the met website) hand gun crime is higher than ever.


what is interesting is the statistical association between illegal guns and gangs/drugs.

If people can smuggle drugs, whats a gun or ten.


Sort drugs and gangs and the stats _WILL_ fall

</RANT>

Julian

[Ernie Rodriguez]

More and more countries are restricting gun sales under the guise of reducing crime??? And I thought we (USA) were the only numb nuts who ignored history and good sense. We are not alone :-)

[peepsight]

When i worked for the Police, we found that the most law abiding section of the British community were licenced gun owners.
We also found that 99% of gun crime was committed by people who were not target shooters or club members and the guns used were not target weapons, but black market weapons.

The bottom line is that licenced target shooters whether pistol or rifle were not committing the crime and their target weapons were not falling into the hands of criminals. To obtain a licence in the UK you must have a Home Office approved gun safe in your home which all licenced gun holders have. The criminals don't.

We have some very tough rules in the UK on fire arm ownership, its not easy but in a way it makes sense and does seem to work for genuine club target shooters. There is always room for improvement in our laws such as Letting pistol shooters start shooting the Olympic disciplines again.

Politics is the problem as these vote hungry politicians deliberately won't separate the genuine licenced club shooter from the gun toting criminal.

The media must also take responsibility for this as they are just as bad as the politicians for lumping all shooters into one bad image. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Peeps

[David Levene]

We have some very tough rules in the UK on fire arm ownership, its not easy but in a way it makes sense and does seem to work for genuine club target shooters.

It's a shame that you don't consider at least some of the 40000+ shooters who lost their cartridge pistols to be "genuine club target shooters". The law certainly doesn't work for us. The vast majority of us didn't shoot Olympic disciplines, just as the vast majority of rifle shooters or shotgunners don't.

[jacques b gros]

I worked for 3 different news papers in my life, and I can assure you that there is no bigger ignorant than a professional journalist. Specially here in Brazil, where you have to go to college to become a newsman. Being the best in the world in your field is not enough, you cannot be a journalist.

What happens? Most of these schools are leftists (not only in Brazil), and only the very good ones force the student to read. The result is that they come out of school full of techniques for holding a microfone, how to order the text in decrescent order of importance and a lot more.

They just don't have experience in life and spend most of it without a field of expertise and very few of them have the general culture needed to understand at least a part of what is going on.

I was interviewed (some 30 yrs ago) by the people of the company's magazine. Somehow they found out that I was 3rd in the Olympics eliminatories of 78 (did not get there, but that's another story). Even with the biggest care to avoid misinterpetration, an offer to review the technical aspects of the thing (refused with a scandalized face), it came out full of mistakes.

If we do not deal with the press as an antagonistic force, we're doomed. NRA, ISSF and others should work together to convince people that the sport is just that, a sport. But then, we have modalities that look like a combat trainning program. How can that be shown on TV without raising a stink? I had to dump a press event in the shooting club because at the same day we had a competition of practical shooting, with some 15o shooters walking around with holsters and clips hanging on theyr belts.

Show that on tv here and you smell it in Canada...

[Bowman26]

I thought they already banned all that over there. I know the UK just increased the laws for airguns sales and transfers as if they were really firearms. Now you can't ship person to person IIRC and the one that really made me laugh. The new database for everyone that wants to get...................drum roll please..................... an AIRSOFT!!! Yes folks they now have database registries for AIRSOFT. Brought to you by your stooge politicians and all on your dime.

Actually I just read a few pieces in the news this week about the new KNIFE BAN in the UK. Since the gun ban has gone so splendidly. Whats next Cricket Bats and Knitting Needles?

Funny part about one article was the cops selling recovered stolen and confiscated goods on some internet site for auctioning such goods. They were selling the very knives they confiscated for being illegal.

Truly MORONS... They want your guns because they fear one day everyone will wake up and realize that yes indeed we are being controlled by a bunch of morons and they need to be taken out of power, but who can do it? It is called control, get along now little sheeple.

And to think I am part Irish.


Bo

[higginsdj]

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" applies to the bulk of the press these days. They are a business and they want to make money and how well or sensational they can tell a story will sell them more newspapers (or higher ratings and thus a bigger advertising dollar on the radio or TV)...... Tabloid journalism - is there anything else these days?

[Practical Shooter]

...But then, we have modalities that look like a combat trainning program. How can that be shown on TV without raising a stink? I had to dump a press event in the shooting club because at the same day we had a competition of practical shooting, with some 15o shooters walking around with holsters and clips hanging on theyr belts.

Show that on tv here and you smell it in Canada...

"We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin
Well, I guess the anti-gun "divide and conquer" strategy is working in Brazil. Meanwhile, back in U.S., a country where practical shooting is growing by leaps and bounds, we just had the country's highest court affirm that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right.
But good luck on that appeasement strategy down there.

[jacques b gros]

[/quote]"We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin
Well, I guess the anti-gun "divide and conquer" strategy is working in Brazil. Meanwhile, back in U.S., a country where practical shooting is growing by leaps and bounds, we just had the country's highest court affirm that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right.
But good luck on that appeasement strategy down there.[/quote]

Sorry, you got it wrong. It's not that I dislike practical shooting, I don't shoot it for the simple reason that it is expensive 'round here. It also grows like grass in Brazil. But we do have to see the image side.

There is no way to disguise the fact that it looks aggressive and, for the morons of the media, that's what is important. Media in Brazil is against guns, and the number of guns in here is a fraction of what you have in the US, proportional to the population. This makes for a relativelly small part of the population that worries about the matter.

The government is against guns, they can vividly imagine them used against itself...this is basically a communist government, with a new marketing dressing. Three ministers were what I call terrorists, took part in the kidnapping of the American embassador when other members of the cabinet were released from jail in exchange for the embassador.

With this in mind you can see that things are not that easy 'round here. Import levvies for anything related to guns is above 100%. Import of pellets is controled, a pistol grip is a gun part, need a previous license to import.


Easy way of life...

Will continue later, duty calls (sunday cooking ;-))

[Sparks]

"We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin

Wonderful. Mind if we try something else entirely? Like, say, not hanging at all?
*sigh*

[j-team]

"We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin

Wonderful. Mind if we try something else entirely? Like, say, not hanging at all?
*sigh*

Don't think you've quite got it. Hanging together doesn't mean multiple nooses, it means sticking together.

Support your fellow shooters even if they shoot a different discipline or type of firearm (hang together). Otherwise the anti gunners will pick us of one by one (hang seperately).

[Sparks]

"We must hang together or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin

Wonderful. Mind if we try something else entirely? Like, say, not hanging at all?
*sigh*

Don't think you've quite got it. Hanging together doesn't mean multiple nooses, it means sticking together.

Not in Ireland it doesn't - here, in our situation, it really does mean multiple nooses.

Remember, we don't have a second amendment, nor do we have the same governmental setup you do. Here, shooters are at most 5% of the electorate - so if the other 95% say "shooting's scary so guns are banned" then oddly enough (for a democracy), guns - all of them get banned. It's happened before and it damn well can happen again, the law permitting it is not only still on the books, there are now a dozen or more others (there literally are so many it's hard to count them) that let the Minister ban them all, in one go, with a single stroke of the pen and no requirement to go to the Cabinet, the Dail, the Seanad, the President or the People in order to do so. And there is no real appeals mechanism, because he'd be abiding by the law of the land, as passed by the Dail and the Seanad and signed by the President.

For that reason, the fundamental job of an target shooting advocate over here is not promoting all target shooting sports equally (even if we do try to do that as often as we can). Instead, the job of an advocate over here is to educate the other 95% as to the safe and harmless nature of target shooting. Do that, you save it all; fail, you lose it all. That's the straight-up nature of the game. That may not be a system you'd want to live under; we don't have much of a choice, unless you've got visas and relocation funds and jobs and homes and farms and schools for 200,000 people from all walks of life that you'd care to give to a bunch of foreigners.

The sad fact is that there is a distinct disparity in how the public sees different kinds of target shooting, and no matter how much we know that IPSC has a safety record that's better than lawn bowls or chess, I've yet to meet a member of the "uninitiated" public who get the impression of "safe and harmless" from photos or video of IPSC shooting. The end result of that is that we lead with a different foot in the media over here; we pick the cleanest-looking, safest-looking sports and that's usually taken by the 5% of the "initiated" public as a stab-in-the-back approach (even though they don't moan when you only push the photos of the photogenic shooters I notice...) and before you know where you are, there are factions within camps within the sport and most of us get fed up to the back teeth with it and just want to walk away and let someone else find out what the sharp end of the 2% rule feels like.

And then someone posts the Franklin quote and to those of us who've put in a decade of our lives to the sport despite a lot of problems and obstacles and very little reward, it always, regardless of the good intent of the poster, comes across as smug-git-ness.

Frankly, I'd rather someone else just volunteered to organise the next airgun open or to collate the national results for .22 pistol, or otherwise got up off their armchair-sequestered butts and did some sort of actual sport-related work over here. But that's just me :D

[top end]

Well said Sparks, this is very similiar to the Australian context.