I have been writing articles for The Fishing Paper and Hunting News for eight years.
It all started after Crimpy ( who started this paper ) and I had known each other for a while, and he had a stand at an Auckland gun show, which I was working at for Pistol NZ. I had gone for a walk and was at his stand when he arrived back and said some not so nice things about me, which I couldn’t say much about as I had just used the exact same words to describe him!
After we had finished our mutual appreciation spiel, we had a talk in the lounge at the airport and he kindly offered me a spot in his magazine so I could promote pistol shooting.
This was too good an opportunity to pass up, I sure wasn’t going to point out how badly I did in English at school, that was for him to learn on another day. I never would have thought I would still be going this long and can’t say how thankful to both him and Nicola for allowing me to carry on.
While it was hard to get positive coverage of shooting back then it has been so much harder since the Christchurch shooting.
This has led me to do more than just promote the pistol side of shooting as the fight to keep our rights to gun ownership is very real. It is not often we see anything positive about sporting shooters or hunting now and most of the media are against us, the last Government sure as hell weren’t our friends.
The truth hasn’t changed we have never been a problem; we have just picked on a sport others have been told we shouldn’t be a part of.
Personally, I don’t like cricket, it is boring at best and just an excuse to drink beer, or beer is what makes cricket worth watching, the difference is I have never tried to have it banned or set up a huge organisation to tell them how to play so it’s safe. That’s just what has happened to us. I have had lots of coverage to both sing our own praises and to attack some of the ‘BS.’
So many legislative changes haven’t done jack about making it safer. This is going to take lots of work to get the parties to understand our side and to give us all an Arms Act that works and is based on knowledge and evidence.
I have just returned from a holiday in Rarotonga with some fellow shooters and we tried our hand at fishing for marlin. All I can say is I can hit the targets better than get those damn fish onto lines.Not even a single bite , still we all had fun.
