The Cable Bay Pistol Club has made the move to an electronic sign-in system.
I had been looking into electronic sign-in systems for a while, as the demands placed on clubs by the Firearms Safety Authority just keep getting bigger. The time and pressures on our club secretary have continued to build. While we had been using a paper-based system, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In the past, we only had to report the 12 shoots that every pistol endorsement holder must complete each year to maintain their endorsement. That has changed. Every year they seem to want more and more information. I don’t know what they use it for, and they don’t explain why they need it. To make sure Charles, our club secretary, doesn’t decide to quit, because I certainly don’t want the job, and with one financial year ending and another beginning, it was the right time to make the change.
I had spoken with a couple of clubs that have their own electronic systems, but their situations are different from ours because we don’t have power on site. Craig, from Wellington, has been working on this system for the last couple of years or more, and I’d been talking with him about it for quite some time. I’d seen how it worked, and he had also met with Pistol NZ and given a presentation at our AGM. I have shot with Craig at a number of matches over the years, and computers are both his passion and his profession, so he knows what he’s doing.
My problem is that when people start talking about computers, it all sounds like “blah, blah, blah” to me, so damn boring! I would much rather talk about guns and how a shoot is going or how it went.
Still, change can be a good thing, and this system works. It’s easy, even for me.
It’s simple. Just scan the QR code and enter the usual details, your name, firearms licence number, PNZ number, and so on. The system is also geotagged to the club, providing proof that you were actually there. The QR code can be a printed copy, or Craig has an electronic version in a small rechargeable unit that changes the code automatically.
Once I had entered my details, I haven’t had to enter them again. The system keeps a running total of your visits, and, more importantly, when the end of the year comes around, all the information is there and ready to send in.
At this stage, this is mainly a pistol club issue because of the requirement to record how many times members attend their own club and visit other clubs. What the future holds, no one knows.
No other sporting group in New Zealand is treated like this. We are vetted more thoroughly than anyone else, and our clubs have more oversight and compliance requirements than most. It’s not as though our members have a poor safety record or regularly cause problems, so I’m not sure what we’ve done to be treated this way.
