Thank you! Your support for our campaign to convince the Tasmanian Government to change its position on the shooting sports may have had an impact.
Whether it will get the change we want remains to be seen.
Premier Gutwein doubled down on his ban on off-campus target shooting – but organised for his education minister to meet with us to discuss the matter anyway.
In fact his office followed up with us to make sure we got the invite.
Premier responds to your emails
Shooters who responded to our call to email the Tasmanian Premier, Peter Gutwein, about this stance on off-campus shooting activities, are now starting to receive a standard reply from his office (click here to see it).
The reply reiterates the government’s view that shooting poses a:
“risk of injury”
That is a slight improvement on the previous stance, which was that shooting poses a:
“risk of serious injury”
.. and a big improvement from the government’s stance in their first written response, which was that shooting can be linked with:
“violence and aggression”
While the government has softened its message, it’s still on the wrong side of the safety equation.
It’s still insulting and factually wrong.
Meeting offer
Since publishing our second story on this matter, the Tasmanian Government has responded to our request for a meeting, perhaps realising the mess it has made of this issue.
Arrangements being made for our Vice President to meet with the Minister for Education, Sarah Courtney, at Parliament House in Hobart in early September.
While the offer came from the Minister’s office, we received confirmation of this from the Premier’s office.
What this tells us is that our message got through. Whether it is enough to get change remains to be seen.
While we are not reading anything into this, we’re obviously pleased to see the door open. All we need now is for our borders to stay open.
We’ve invited the Tasmanian Clay Target Association, who has been an important part of this campaign, to join us at the meeting.
Don’t forget, if you belong to a Tasmanian gun club and would like to arrange a catch-up, let us know by email. Click here to email us (opens up your email client).
What else we’re doing
There are two other things the NSC is doing to progress this.
The first is that we’re still keen to send a message through the upper house elections in Tasmania.
The upper house in Tasmania works on a rotational basis which means some seats are contested every year. We’ve already started discussions with the SFFP Tasmania to see what we can do in the two electorates up for grabs in 2022. We’ll continue to work on the upper house – at every election – until the message to treat shooters with more respect gets through.
The second thing we’re doing is that we’ll be writing to every gun club in Tasmania to let them know what is going on. We might however do this after we’ve had our meeting with Minister Courtney so we have the latest info on the government’s position.
WHAT you can do
Thank you to everyone who emailed the Premier!
What we need to do now is drive the message as hard as possible with the Gutwein Government. They need to know that shooters matter, and deserve to be treated better.
The most important thing you can do to help make this work, is to support the NSC by becoming a member.
Then spread the word by talking with your fellow shooters.
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Excellent result. Gun owners need a focused ginger group to support them and you guys are fulfilling that role. Keep up the good work.
Totally agree. Have been a member of major shooting organisations for more years than I care to count. The only feedback I ever get is a general “ We’re working on it “ or “ it politically sensitive so we need to go slowly” End of conversation!
I joined the NSC after a shooting mate emailed me about them. I received more feedback and saw more outcomes in the first year then I had in 30 plus years with the others.
When I rang the state office of the organisation involved all I copped were unfounded negative remarks about the NSC. Quite pathetic really and not what I expected from the supposed premier body representing Australian shooters.
Good work NSC, you have my support.
When.a particular politician saids, “Guns are associated with violence” they are making a blanket statement that gun owners are violent people. By the same reasoning when one saids, “Politicians are associated with corruption” can we conclude all politicians are corrupt?