Shooting learns to play the PR game
The PR industry loves nothing more than naming a day. National Haemorrhoids Day is a favourite in parts of the Yorkshire coalfield, I'm told.
Of late we've gone to naming weeks - I suspect in an effort to demonstrate that we can give our campaign legs (though it's more likely about stretching the appeal and publicity opportunities). Whippet Fettlers' Week would be my choice, if such a thing existed.
Happily, National Shooting Week exists and it kicks off on May 26th. You may not care for this but I do - and like many in the shooting fraternity, I'm delighted that our hobby is sufficiently street-wise to have dreamt it up, however unoriginal it may now be.
What such ruses do is give the originator the opportunity to showcase their subject matter and, in skilful hands, can provide the platform for a varied and intensive programme of events capable of engaging the media and the wider public in a myriad of ways.
In shooting's case, that's about encouraging people to try the sport whilst pointing out the safety and responsibility of the shooting community. It also enables us to talk about the huge amount of conservation work shooters do, and the broader benefits of that in terms of bio-diversity (according to this government, no great ally of shooting, land managed proactively for shooting sustains a bio-diversity five times greater than land that isn't).
And if you think that anything involving flinging a lead projectile at 3,000 feet per second cannot be safe, try this: more people are committed to hospital each year with injuries caused by cotton ear buds than they are from injuries caused by legally held weapons.
As for the folly of giving people weapons in the first place, the Home Office told us recently that gun crimes committed with legally held weapons were 'statistically insignificant'. To qualify for that you have to be at or below 0.01% of the relevant crime category. Legal gun ownership isn't the problem, then, it's the illegal ownership of illegal weapons.
Which reminds me of a comment made by my firearms enquiry officer on a recent visit to my house to discuss an application to upgrade my firearm certificate.
Going through my application with the usual stern formality, he said "I note that you live in Liverpool 8, sir". The eighth postal district in Liverpool also includes a leafy hamlet known as Toxteth.
"Lots of people around here have firearms," he went on, warming to the task.
"It's just that you're the first person to have bothered asking for permission."
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