Gardai proposals to ban firearms

Nekarsulm

Tea drinker wrote: »

I dunno, what's wrong with this language? That's the way the unions speak all the time and last time I checked things were just dandy for them.

I think the problem is, what legal action can you take when your license is refused, other than Court.
Hiding your target pistol /pump action shotgun/semi auto rifle and refusing to surrender them to the authorities simply makes you an armed criminal. I can see the Gardai and anti gun ownership elements seizing the opportunity to try a blanket ban. A Union threatening to cause a bus or teachers strike will be handled a lot differently.

tac foley

Right now I'm over six thousand miles away on the Oregon Coast, and even at this distance it is plain to me that you are being stitched up.

Your hats are being crapped in, your beer is being p*ssed in, you are being treated as no account annoyances that interfere and dare to intrude with the machinations of the democratic process [yeah,right].

Six weeks silence?

Does that not say something positive to you all?

If there was ever any intent to treat you fairly, it would have been done without delay, to show that the democratic process was actually working the way that your governmdent say that it does.

The way that your representatives SWORE to carry out the governing of your country when they took office.

Shooters all, you have been driven over and shunted into yesterday-land, and as we all know to our cost, a day ago in politics is as gone as five hundred years ago.

tac

Sparks

tac foley wrote: »

Does that not say something positive to you all?

Yes, it says that this is being treated as a can of worms nobody wants to open, which is the best possible result for us. There is absolutely no way that the Firearms Act is getting fixed because of this. Even if the will was there to put the resources into that, even if you could get people to go along with it instead of eating half the resources with useless shouting and tablebanging, even if you could get the drafts through the AGs office without them mangling clear text into legalese that didn't mean the same thing, even if the Minister let us draft the law without the other shareholders having an equal say, even if this hypothetical draft made it to the floor of the Dail, you would then have every backbench TD facing annihilation in the next election looking to use it to get into the media the way we've seen Finian McGrath do of late.

As to the rest of your shouting, it works in the US, where you have constitutional protections. It does not work here, where we don't, and it only makes our situation worse. That is all it ever has done and there is absolutely no indication that it can have a positive long-term effect.

yubabill1

Have to agree with Sparks on this one - Shooters came across well in front of Justice Committee - no shouting or table-banging needed there: Well-constructed arguments delivered calmly and professionally.

We have several complaints with BAI, even one upheld complaint would be an embarrassment for the gov't/RTE.

Shooters have shown themselves to be represented by educated, literate, capable and able people.

I believe it would be fallacious to impose even a partial ban right now, with the election upon us.

I also imagine the authorities need time to realise that a cap/partial ban would be illegal/difficult to construct. If they are drafting heads of bills, they will need more time than they've got - the WG draft in the report is less than useless.

Backbarrel

I love the last line of the most recent Sports Coalition update:

"that there is a feeling developing that there are behind the scenes moves to try to ‘con’ the shooting community."

Ironic or what?

tac foley

Sparks wrote: »

As to the rest of your shouting, it works in the US, where you have constitutional protections. It does not work here, where we don't, and it only makes our situation worse. That is all it ever has done and there is absolutely no indication that it can have a positive long-term effect.

Sir, you've missed the points, and making out that I'm a disinterested furriner is a foul blow. YOU know, and many others here know, that I am still, as for the last seven years or so, a strong supporter of legal shooting in the Republic of Ireland, and strongly involved in one particular aspect of it - that of classic rifle shooting - although ALL shooting sports get my support, whether or not I take part in them.

1. I'm vacationing in the US - I live much of the time in the UK where

2. I experienced having ALL my centre-fire rifles and carbines taken off me in 1988, and, in 1997,

3. ALL of my large collection of handguns, including the many .22cal that were not part of the original prohibition plan. Only three survived to go into the national collection. Seven were deactivated and 98 were destroyed.

The total value of my guns was well north of 65,000 euros, and at the time I was an officer in the British Army, not that that mattered a hoot, of course, since we are all treated as civilians in law when it comes to firerams.

So, being reasonable seems to do nothing - you get walked over as a result.

And being shouty would certainly have the same effect - perhaps, even worse, with seizure and imprisonment the result. Over in UK we were advised to hand in our guns without making any kind of a fuss, as the SWAT teams were there ready to act if any of us refused to do so. Nobody wanted to get into a shooting match on our own doorstep with fully-armed police marksmen, so we all complied with the desperately unfair law change, and gave up our guns without any kind of physical fight.

Only Northern Ireland told the Westminster foamers to go pound sand, and good for them. They kept their handguns.

Being shouty would also get you branded as gun nuts, in spite of the rigorous examination we all go through in order to legally acquire our guns, something that seems somehow to have eluded the nay-sayers totally.

tac

Sparks

tac foley wrote: »

making out that I'm a disinterested furriner is a foul blow

It's also not the point I was making and it is not a point I care about.

The point I was making is that the tactics used in the US can not and do not and have not worked here because shooters in the US enjoy more legal protections than we do. People keep saying we should employ them because people get justifiably and understandably angry at the way the PTB behave here. But using those tactics doesn't work, costs money, does long-term damage and leaves us in a worse situation afterwards than where we were before, so as unpleasant and difficult as it is, we're better off in the long run not taking the easy road.

Right now we're in a lousy spot, largely thanks to a very few people in our own community who created an opportunity that one or two people in the AGS latched onto. Our best bet is to try to get this whole mess kicked down the road into an FCP-like committee where we're back at the table and any drafts have to involve us instead of sneaking up on us from behind closed doors. This nonsense of thinking we can pound the table and fix the problem in court and solve everything fast, which others are now trying to sell us, is a crock of ****e.

garrettod

Hi,

Are there many people here having trouble getting their .22 rimfire pistol licences renewed this year (I appreciate the renewals fall at different times of the year, but we're now almost six months into the year and I don't think I've seen or heard of any mention of this problem, myself) ?

Sorry, not asking everyone to disclose personal details but just wondering in principal, is this actually happening during 2015 ?

Thanks.

BattleCorp

garrettod wrote: »

Hi,

Are there many people here having trouble getting their .22 rimfire pistol licences renewed this year (I appreciate the renewals fall at different times of the year, but we're now almost six months into the year and I don't think I've seen or heard of any mention of this problem, myself) ?

Sorry, not asking everyone to disclose personal details but just wondering in principal, is this actually happening during 2015 ?

Thanks.

I renewed my .22.lr pistol licence last year. There were no problems.

Grizzly 45

I got a 308 caliber change on a semi auto rifle within a week ,two weeks ago,and one that was fought twice in the DC in the last 6 years.Which he could have objected to as well.No problem there either.

Deaf git

I think it's the usual postcode lottery we've always had. New licences, Substitutions, Renewals, Moderators etc are still determined by the the local Super. Some of the Supers are ok, some are not and some others defy classification.

hexosan

Does anyone know of someone been granted a .22 pistol licence (new application) in the past few months. Can't imagine there's been many while this review is going on.

Deaf git

hexosan wrote: »

Does anyone know of someone been granted a .22 pistol licence (new application) in the past few months. Can't imagine there's been many while this review is going on.

A chap in my club applied back in January. 3 weeks from application to grant letter.

yubabill1

Deaf git wrote: »

A chap in my club applied back in January. 3 weeks from application to grant letter.

Seems to me from the positive replies that it would make sense for AGS not to aggravate the Minister with court cases while she's considering a ban they have requested....?

Deaf git

hexosan wrote: »

Does anyone know of someone been granted a .22 pistol licence (new application) in the past few months. Can't imagine there's been many while this review is going on.

Clear out your mailbox Hex!

hexosan

Deaf git wrote: »

Clear out your mailbox Hex!

Done

BoatMad

I think our best bet in the forthcoming election. Hopefully this will be " back boilered" and not revisited till well after a new Gov is in place

IN the meantime, I cant understand how the SC has retained any mandate

clawback07

BoatMad wrote: »

I think our best bet in the forthcoming election. Hopefully this will be " back boilered" and not revisited till well after a new Gov is in place

IN the meantime, I cant understand how the SC has retained any mandate

I don't understand the benefit of long fingering the issue until after the next election ,what advantage is there in doing that ? If the sc let six weeks go by without enquiring as to what was happening and then blame the minister and co. ,we are back to shambolic representation . I still believe we will not get a better chance of sorting this out then with the present minister and garda commissioner .

BoatMad

clawback07 wrote: »

I don't understand the benefit of long fingering the issue until after the next election ,what advantage is there in doing that ? If the sc let six weeks go by without enquiring as to what was happening and then blame the minister and co. ,we are back to shambolic representation . I still believe we will not get a better chance of sorting this out then with the present minister and garda commissioner .

yes its the " sorting this out " that worries me

Sparks

clawback07 wrote: »

I don't understand the benefit of long fingering the issue until after the next election ,what advantage is there in doing that ?

It's lower risk. Why is kindof an old story:

Sparks wrote: »

What you might also want to ruminate on for a bit is that with actual gun crime levels a political hot potato, we don't want to see a Firearms Bill anytime soon; because every single backbench TD and Senator is going to want to be seen to be speaking about "the issue of the day" on Oireachtas Report, what with a General Election coming up sometime in the next two years. Which means that, even if it was the perfect unicorn of a well-written Firearms Bill at the first stage in the Dail (and it won't be, it'll be a mess); by the time the Lowrys, the Healy-Reas, the Mullens, most of the Sinn Fein TDs (don't ask me why, but that party has a really odd track record when it comes to making the Firearms Act an unwieldy mess), the Greens and the Deasys had had their way with it, it'd be a dog's breakfast and we'd be the ones stuck with it.

Sparks wrote: »

I've sat through two full cycles of that now. Not only will it make everything worse, it'll take ages and be mangled by every backbench attention-seeker in the dail and seanad...

Besides, we already know the first thing we need to do with the firearms act is push for a restatement of it, with absolutely no changes. Because right now, there are maybe three or four dozen people in the entire country who have a working understanding of the act, and none of those have a working understanding of the entire act (though they've no call to since it covers not only our stuff but the stuff you see used in criminal trials as well). I suppose it could be worse, it used to barely be a dozen at one point. But that's not because it's written in latin, it's because it's spread over 20 or so acts, dozens of SIs and then of course the non-legislative guidelines and so forth. All that has to get read into the one document, so we have one single definitive act and know where we stand; until that point, trying to fix what's broken is a fool's errand (especially since you'll need to do it after you've fixed everything anyway). There's a reason that both the law reform commission and the most reactionary high court justice I know about have both been saying the same thing about this for years - because it's an obvious, yet easily solvable problem...

Sparks wrote: »

The last thing we need is to start from scratch. I mean, we don't even have scratch or square one or whatever you want to call it.

We need a restatement of the firearms act into one single document.
We need a revisit to the restricted firearms SI to fix it so that activities like answering the phone for a paintball field isn't a criminal act punishable by seven years in prison and twenty grand of fines.
Then we'll be at square one. And getting those two is about four years of hard work right there.

...

Changing legislation is a long, tedious, anonymous, unsexy, thankless, expensive, tiring and fustrating process, where you have to deal with everyone from the Firearms Unit of the DoJ, to Garda HQ to the Minister to the AG's office (and you'll go from DoJ to AG a lot - twenty or thirty times) to the backbenchers in the Dail and Seanad who want to be in the papers, to the AGS themselves when they implement it.

And that's the people who aren't trying to undermine your work from within the shooting community because they don't like you or don't like someone you're working with or haven't had their morning ego stroke yet, or who just want to f*ck about because apparently that's more fun than actually shooting for them.

Ten years of my life I spent doing this, along with a dozen or two others, and even reading the idea of looking at it being done again when so few people actually know what's involved is enough to make me want a stiff drink.

Sparks wrote: »

The problem here with talking about changes is this:
No matter how perfect your proposed changes are, and no matter how high the fidelity between your idea and the Bill that the Minister lays before the Dail (and no matter how little mangling the AG's office did to it before that point), every backbencher with an interest in getting into the press ahead of the upcoming General Election is going to want to tweak it so they can get into the media as helping to stem the gun crime problem. Won't matter if their idea's good or bad (though past experience says it'll be woeful), they'll want the air time to help keep their seats because every politico is eyeing the next election the way a postman eyes a rottweiller.

This is the problem with trying to drive through large or complex changes in the law. You want to do it as little as possible, and you want it as tightly scoped as possible and you want to do it in as quiet a time as possible. Otherwise, you start off with a good idea and end up with a rats-nest of a nightmare on your hands.

Sparks wrote: »

The proposals to increase the sentences? They probably will. Those wouldn't worry me. It's what else might get proposed that would cause the problem - you start off with a simple goal of getting to one single readable firearms act, and then every backbencher looking to get into the papers shows up to committee stage with "just this small idea that'll fix everything" (Really Deputy? Spent twenty years in the sport, have you? Know what the current law is? No? But you think you can fix the law without knowing what it is or anything about what it regulates? Seriously? Go home Deputy McGrath...)

That's what happened the last few times we've done this dance...

Sparks wrote: »

There is absolutely no way that the Firearms Act is getting fixed because of this. Even if the will was there to put the resources into that, even if you could get people to go along with it instead of eating half the resources with useless shouting and tablebanging, even if you could get the drafts through the AGs office without them mangling clear text into legalese that didn't mean the same thing, even if the Minister let us draft the law without the other shareholders having an equal say, even if this hypothetical draft made it to the floor of the Dail, you would then have every backbench TD facing annihilation in the next election looking to use it to get into the media the way we've seen Finian McGrath do of late.

Sparks wrote: »

We keep talking about what changes would be best.

The problem is that any changes would have to go through the Oireachtas, and that means that not only would you have to get a Bill drafted despite the opposition of certain parties in the Gardai, and despite all the help from the Attorney General's office, and all the supervision from the Justice department; but you then have to see that Bill go through a Dail full of backbench TDs in the months before an election when they are desperate to get media attention.

I don't care how perfect the Bill you draft is, the Oireachtas will do to it what your digestive system does to a five-star michelin meal prepared by the finest chef in the best restaurant in the world, and what comes out the other end in both cases will bear a striking resemblance to each other.

J.R.

http://nargc.ie/letter-sent-to-both-houses-on-24th-of-june-2015/

Sparks

J.R. wrote: »

http://nargc.ie/letter-sent-to-both-houses-on-24th-of-june-2015/

yubabill1

Let's wait and see what happens this Tues (SC letter says Min Fitzgerald MAY bring proposals to Cabinet Tues/ FG PP on Wed).

If proposals are unfavourable, we must stick together, despite our differences.

I have serious reservations about SC proposals, but I'm willing to suspend them if this goes badly for us.

Big picture and all that.

I'm pretty certain that the gov't will think it's trying to find a compromise, while the all compromising will be from one side only.

Let's hope that "MAY bring proposals to Cabinet" is highly qualified and turns out not to be the case.

I'm prepared to vote tactically in this election, even if it means voting for FG or for someone else.

Sparks

yubabill1 wrote: »

If proposals are unfavourable, we must stick together, despite our differences.

Which is the line the SC kept pushing from day one.
And which the ignored the instant they saw a chance to shove some groups under a bus, whether it was ISSF shooters or people who had licences for AR-15 style rifles.

I don't believe the SC actually means to stick together at all. I think they're the last people you'd want behind you at a bus stop.

yubabill1

Sparks wrote: »

Which is the line the SC kept pushing from day one.
And which the ignored the instant they saw a chance to shove some groups under a bus, whether it was ISSF shooters or people who had licences for AR-15 style rifles.

I don't believe the SC actually means to stick together at all. I think they're the last people you'd want behind you at a bus stop.

Agreed.

No argument from me on any of the above.

However, we don't have a choice on who our bedfellows are, if unfavourable proposals are put before the Cabinet on Tues - things could possibly move quickly and uncontrollably from there, as you have pointed out more than once - bandwagon, amendments, grandstanding etc. are all distinct possibilities and we could find ourselves in a very uncomfortable position: Divisions would have to take second place in such a scenario IMHO.

We will have to wait and see what happens on Tues - I'm just thrashing it out in advance, so that we are prepared.

I don't like this, either.

Roosevelt wasn't particularly enthusiastic in joining Churchill and had to have his hand forced, in the end. (He got his revenge, posthumously, by deconstruction of all the old empires of Europe (except the weakest -Russia - but that's a long story).

Edit: Possibly, Cabinet will be too busy next week to consider these proposals -

1. BBC saying citizens withdrawing their money from ATM's in Greece today is not a run on the banks; but Greece will have defaulted if the 1.5bn is not paid on 30 June - serious implications for euro currency area

2. Tunisia - one Irish woman killed and two Irish citizens missing following the atrocity.

garrettod

yubabill1 wrote: »

....I'm prepared to vote tactically in this election, even if it means voting for FG or for someone else.

Absolutely, infact I will also lobby friends and family hard to help ensure support is gained or lost, for appropriate politicans & would encourage everyone else to do likewise. We really don't use our influence anything like we should, when it comes to politics, imho.

yubabill1 wrote: »

....Divisions would have to take second place in such a scenario IMHO.

I agree.

Grizzly 45

yubabill1 wrote: »

Agreed.

Edit: Possibly, Cabinet will be too busy next week to consider these proposals -

1. BBC saying citizens withdrawing their money from ATM's in Greece today is not a run on the banks; but Greece will have defaulted if the 1.5bn is not paid on 30 June - serious implications for euro currency area

2. Tunisia - one Irish woman killed and two Irish citizens missing following the atrocity.

May 23rd 2008 the day arse falls out of Irish economy. Min Dermott Aherne addresses AOGSI meet and states he will tightnen up on firearms liscensing. When major crisis happen govts and men sink to the level they are best qualified at dealing with.

Sparks

Aherne wasn't speaking to cabinet that day (Fitzgerald is), and I still don't agree that that's when he decided to bring in his ban anyway (I still say that he didn't care any more about speeches to the AOGSI than he did to any other campaign speech or promise), Jim Deasy and Olivia Mitchell's point-scoring bull**** in the Dail had far more to do with that than AGS ever did.

BattleCorp

We will have to wait and see what happens on Tues - I'm just thrashing it out in advance, so that we are prepared.

I'm an impatient fcuker. Is the Minister screwing us or leaving us alone? Any word yet?

2011

BattleCorp wrote: »

I'm an impatient fcuker. Is the Minister screwing us or leaving us alone? Any word yet?

I'm told by someone that claims to be "close to the action" that it is all good, we will be left alone.
I really don't know whether to believe him or not but to date he has been 100% correct.

Fingers crossed.