In Reply to: Re: Hunting R.I.P. posted by Sue Orchard on October 03, 2004 at 15:52:43:
: : Sue,
You are absolutely right, in my opinion. Your comments mirror fairly accurately what I said back in 1996/7 when the then Conservative Government was legislating against the sport of target pistol shooting.
The problem then, as now, was that the Pastor Neimollers of this World did not believe that what was happening to pistol shooters could possibly happen to them. The efforts of the Sportsman's Association to persuade Government, by peaceful protest marches, political lobbying, letter writing campaigns etc. were not sufficiently well supported by other groups of sports people to achieve effectiveness. We won every argument but lost the campaign. In the cynical interests of the principal political parties, each of them determined to appear more draconian and public spirited (at the same time!)than the otheres in their determination to extract maximum electoral advantage from an absolute tragey (Dunblane), concepts like 'proportionate', 'reasonable reaction', 'what actually went wrong?' etc. were simply ignored. (What went wrong was that the Central Scotland Polcie, for a period of some 20 years prior to the Dunblane massacre of 13th March 1996, simply failed to apply the provisions of the Firearms Act 1968 properly in the case of Thomas Hamilton. Don't just take my word for that, read the official report of the Public Inquiry conducted by Lord Cullen. It's all there in black and white. Who got punished for the failure of the police? We did, some 57000 target pistol shooters who had absolutely no involvement in the murders and who were just as appalled by them as anyone else in the country.
We wasted an awful lot of time, effort and money in trying to influence Government using the legitimate methods we thought were available to us. We should have done things differently: We should either have have bribed the un-principled shower that constitute our established political parties - instead of wasting our money on demonstrations etc - or got directly involved in politics back then. If we had established and invested a healthy fighting fund, instead of fruitlessly trying to rely on Parliament to look after our interests as a law-abiding, minority group of citizens of this Realm, we would now have also amassed adequate funds to finance our political activities wihtout the need for constant demands upon the dispossessed for yet mor money for 'the fight.'
To my mind, direct involvement in politics (which is why we formed the Countryside Party in the first place) is the only way in which we are ever going to wrest our country back from the pressent crop of politicians.
We don't have much time left, in my view, before it will be too late.
Richard Malbon