We’ve got plenty of shooting organisations who say they’re fighting for us.
We’ve also got plenty of examples of where that hasn’t worked.
So what’s the answer?

Why are shooters struggling?

DEPENDING on where you are, gun laws and bad gun policies are all around us.

For some, we look to our main shooting organisations to help protect us against these – but in some countries, they are notoriously ineffective.

That’s a shame, because we’re all on the same side, but for whatever reason, it just seems we aren’t always pulling in the same direction.

There’s various reasons for that, but to me the greatest tragedy is that it means our opponents are winning.

Why?

In my view – and don’t be shy in telling me if you disagree  – it comes down to the skillsets that we need to fight bad laws and bad policies.

Without that, we are relying on hope and enthusiasm but we certainly aren’t relying on strategy.

Where is the strategy?

It’s easy to ask that question and it isn’t meant to be denegrating the efforts of those who are trying.

However you can’t with a war without one, and if we don’t have one, then we can’t win the war .

What could success look like?

How we fight and win the war is not clear.  However one thing which I think will help provide some guidance is looking at the nature of our problem.

Our problems aren’t about gun range safety or availability of equipment. It is about perception and how that perception is used against us.

If I might offer a suggestion, our problem has several linkages that can be easily observed.

Politicians who are chasing votes speak with the media. People follow the media and believe what they are shown.  Politicians see that and think there are more votes where peoples’ beliefs might be.

That’s the cycle we need to break.

Narrowing down to the skillset

What this tells me is that winning at politics does not simply mean having more shooters standing up to be counted.

After all, you can’t run a panel beating business if the people working at it are cooks. They need to be panel beaters.

In the same way, if you want to beat politicians at their own game, we need more shooters who know about politics. 

That, I would suggest, is the skillset that many of the shooting organisations who are trying to fight for us lack.

Narrowing down to the skillset

The good news is that there are those who I believe know that.

One example of a group that I’ve come across that knows what to do is Grass Roots North Carolina. If you haven’t read it yet, grab a copy of “Rules for ANTI-Radicals: A Practical Handbook for Defeating Leftism” by Paul Valone.  You can see more about it here. 

Then there’s Tom Gresham from GunTalk which you can subscribe to here.  

If we could clone Paul and Tom and pop them around in different countries, I honestly believe we would be having a different conversation.  Not because of 2A and other stuff that is relevant to the US, but because of how they are approaching “our” problem.

If we could add to that people like Martin Salter from the UK and David Lleyonhelm from Australia, then we would be on the right track.

We would be focussing on our political fights in the right way.

Where to from here?

There will not be an easy answer.

It’s taken us decades to get into the sort of political problems we have now, so I expect it will take a long time to get to where we need to be.

I do not know the answer to the question, but it is my hope that I can at least do my little bit to help out, right here.

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