2018 Northcourt Trophy – Prone Rifle Shoot

The Northcourt Prone Rifle Trophy was shot on June 5th 2018 in near perfect conditions at Downend Range. At the competition start the sun was up, and the wind was very gently flicking between 10 and 2 o’clock. Partway through the first detail it then dropped to virtually nothing, and remained like that for the remainder of the shoot.

Results:

5th July 2016. Scratch Score: 20 shots @50m. 2 x 90 seconds per 10 shot string

21st June 2016 Single Dewar

7th June 2016 (40 shots @50m)

Douglas Hall Cup Shoot Results

24th May 2016 (Name your own start: 20 shots @50m & 20 shots @100yds)

Congratulations to Dom Cowen with a perfect score of 400.

Anti-gun interests in the European Union (EU) are using the Paris and Brussels attacks to introduce wide-ranging new legislation to ban firearms used by sportsmen and hunters, despite no such equipment being used by the Islamist terrorists.

Illegal, fully-automatic AK47 rifles have become a hallmark of Islamist terror in Western Europe, having been used in the Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Thalys, and Belgian Jewish Museum attacks. These weapons, despite having been outlawed across the continent by the European Union in 1991, remain easy to obtain as they are smuggled across Europe’s open, unchecked borders with ease.

Despite the evidence that present prohibition of ‘category A’ — fully automatic — firearms has failed to work the EU is now using the Brussels bombing as a pretext to push through a ban of ‘category B’ weapons. Encompassing a variety of equipment but clearly focussed on semi-automatic long arms popular with Europe’s significant hunting community, a grass-roots campaign movement is moving to oppose the change, reports Politico.

Pan-European shooting sport interest group Firearms United is pushing a Change.org petition — so far signed by over 316,000 people and aiming for half a million — and is stirring up trouble in Brussels.

Already strict EU anti-gun legislation did not stop the Charlie Hebdo killers from easily acquiring AK47 rifles in Paris

Firearms United activist Katja Triebel spoke to Breitbart London and said that the European Commission had failed to target the true source of terrorist weapons and instead was going after sportsmen and collectors. She said: “Brussels has missed the chance to harness the expertise [of the firearms industry] and will of these sectors to tackle the root problem…  large ex-military stockpiles in the Balkans and the unrecorded sale of military firearms that are inadequately deactivated or converted to [blank firing weapons] Slovakia and hence easily re-convertible to their original form”.

One of the greatest crimes of the proposed new controls suggested after the Paris attacks, and repeated after the Brussels bombing is the effect it would have on collections of historic firearms. The rules, said Ms. Triebel amounted to little more than cultural vandalism.

Expressing concern this particular part of the Commission’s proposals had received no media attention, she said: “The proposed measures included the destruction of thousands of irreplaceable heritage artefacts held by museums and recognised collectors.

“The Commission actually proposed that museums should have all their historical automatic firearms deactivated, leaving them useless for study and research for future generations.

In addition the new rules would also prevent museums from acquiring new items. As for those private collectors, the destruction would be even greater: “the Commission proposed that this heritage should be confiscated and destroyed without compensation to the owners.

“Citizens with even the slightest modicum of cultural appreciation, those who would have cringed when ISIS destroyed the temples of Palmyra will find this wanton act of institutionalised vandalism hard to digest”.

Speaking to Politico, Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation spokesman Filippo Segato said the legislation would hit minorities in the hunting community hardest. Highlighting the need to crack down on the black market rather than ordinary citizens, Mr. Segato said: “We don’t use Kalashnikovs for hunting”, and remarked semi-automatic firearms are most often used by women, and disabled hunters.

Driving home the point that hunters and sportsmen in Europe don’t tend to use the AK47’s associated with terrorism, he compared cracking down on sporting weapons after terror attacks to “getting a speeding ticket even if you have a driving license”.

On the defensive a Commission spokesman insisted that, despite the timing and clear use of terrorist attacks as a reason for the legislation, it wasn’t all about terror. They said: “The question of firearms is not limited to terrorist attacks… We cannot ignore that legal firearms have been used in other tragic events where children were killed in a school or young people massacred in a holiday camp. This directive is not about terrorism, but about firearms and public security”.

Ms. Triebel pointed to a recent article she had written on the subject — ‘How To Decrease Firearms Related Deaths’ — which pointed out that legally held firearms in the EU were emphatically not a problem. Stating “Most, if not all… firearms-related death will occur as a result of the possession of illicit weapons… [and] most suppliers are organised crime gangs”, the article quotes freely from the European Commission’s own in-depth study on firearm crime.

The report itself concludes the European Union has “a serious illicit firearms trafficking problem” fuelled by terrorist and criminal gangs, and that “most illicit firearms originate from cross-border trafficking”. Not mentioned are problems with terrorists and criminal gangs using legally owned hunting firearms.

All UK and European firearm owners are being targeted, with this knee jerk reaction by the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs commission (LIBE), which have now appointed Green MEP Bodil Valero as the rapporteur for the EU gun ban proposal, and published its own draft report with the collaboration of many left-wing members of IMCO as well. The document still asks for a far-reaching ban of Category B7 firearms (all those long guns and handguns that “resemble” a firearm with automatic mechanisms, all semi-automatic guns that can accept a magazine, any semi-auto with a barrel length of less than 17 inches, and any semi-auto with a pistol grip). How can you ban something, just because of the way that it looks? It also includes other disastrous provisions. More specifically, the LIBE committee states that EU Member States should be allowed to enact total bans on all forms of private gun ownership, something that has never even been proposed so far!

Other critical proposals in the LIBE draft report include:

• High taxes on gun and ammunition sales.
• A mandatory three-years expiry on all gun licenses.
• Mandatory marking on ALL gun parts, ALL ammunition and components thereof (that including bullets, brass, and primers)

The above examples are just a couple of examples, because there are numerous other new proposals in the latest revision, which seem to have been added by people that haven’t got a clue when it comes to firearms or the law. No thought has gone into them, let alone how they would be implemented, what they would achieve, what impact they would have, the cost of implementing and enforcing them, and the cost to the economy. It just sounds like people putting their own ideas on paper without actually thinking them through. The latest document looks and feels very amateurish and should be thrown out immediately.

One of the original directives (amongst many others) was to ban semi-automatic rifles, it has now evolved, and includes (but is not limited to):

• All Semi-automatic rifles
• Anything that can accept a removable magazine (which includes pistols)
• A number of larger calibre singe shot hunting rifles (anything larger than .500″)
• A number of muzzle loading and useable antique firearms due to their calibre being greater than .50”
• Home reloading of ammunition
• Any modification to a firearm (this would include triggers,

Their definition of semi automatics to be banned are:

• 7. Semi-automatic firearms with one or more of the following characteristics:
  • a) equipped or capable to be equipped with a firing capacity exceeding six rounds without reloading;
  • b) long firearm with pistol grip;
  • c) [long fire]arm of less than 830 mm in length;
  • d) [long fire]arm with a barrel length of less than 450 mm.

Note the lack of the wording ‘long firearm’ in point a. This covers all semi auto pistols and anything that takes a magazine, because if you can buy a magazine for it that holds more than 6 rounds, it will be illegal, as it falls into the ‘Capable’ clause.

According to the EU Directive here: http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/impact/index_en.htm, It States that:

“Before the European Commission proposes a new initiative, it assesses the need for EU action and the potential economic, social and environmental impacts of alternative policy options in an impact assessment.
Impact assessments are prepared for Commission initiatives expected to have significant economic, social or environmental impacts. These can be:

• Legislative proposals,
• Non-legislative initiatives (eg white papers, action plans, financial programmes, negotiating guidelines for international agreements) that define future policies,
• Implementing and delegated acts.”

No Impact assessment has been carried out for this directive, and it is pretty certain that the impact assessment was purposefully avoided because it would kill the proposal outright.

The European Commission and the national Governments that support the EU gun ban in order to be able to enact further restrictions on law-abiding gun owners without taking political responsibility in front of their citizens, are all too aware that, even should those firearms be confiscated without compensation, the simple handling of the procedure, confiscation, storage, transportation and destruction, all to be overseen and documented, would be economically unbearable because of their high costs. The costs of this alone would run into billions, and this is just to destroy them all.

The EU proposes that no compensation will be given, which completely goes against Article 17 – Right to Property of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which states:

Everyone has the right to own, use, dispose of and bequeath his or her lawfully acquired possessions. No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss. The use of property may be regulated by law in so far as is necessary for the general interest.

More information can be found here: http://fra.europa.eu/en/charterpedia/article/17-right-property

If the ban goes ahead, there would be a huge impact and knock on effects in a number of areas that would cost billions of pounds.
This includes (but not limited to):

• Compensation for gun owners
• Cost of disposal for each firearm
• The destruction/downsizing of the firearms industry, which would mean :
  • Numerous businesses going bust or closing down
  • Job losses within industry.
  • These job losses would also result in an increase of pressure on government services and social payments to support to these people
  • The economy would suffer directly with the loss of these businesses due to loss of tax payments etc.
• National, international and World cup events would no longer be hosted for a number of the events that involve the use of these firearms, which would also have a knock on effect to the travel, hotel and tourism industries.
• The Olympic sport of shooting will be decimated and a number of disciplines would be dropped from the Olympics, as there will not be anybody from within Europe that could take part due to the firearms being illegal, and therefore nobody could train to use them etc. etc.
• Farmers, vermin control and rural conservation.

Groups of the Socialists and Democrats at the European Parliament seems to be taking the side of the gun grabbers. Two S&D MEPs in particular − MEP Sylvia-Yvonne Kaufmann (Germany) and MEP Sergio Cofferati (Italy), have been reported to be approaching all S&D MEP’s one by one, in order to try and persuade them to shoot MEP Vicky Ford’s draft report down, and vote in favour of the Commission’s proposals. This would mean that all of the Commission’s senseless restrictions, including those on replicas and deactivated guns, which had been cast aside by Vicky Ford’s report, would be back at the top again!.

There are a number of things that CAN be done in order to achieve the desired result. But what is the desired result, and why? This directive has absolutely nothing to do with terrorists, and would not prevent any further terrorism or future attacks, it is aimed to simply de-arm the population of Europe, and destroy an industry that contributes billions of pounds/euros towards every country’s economies.

This ban would affect a number of our currently legal firearms, including all of our .22 rim fire semi-automatic guns (which are not classes as particularly dangerous), and are used for both vermin control, and target shooting.

So what do you need to do?

Write to, or email your MEP, and the MEP’s listed below voicing your concerns.

UK MEP’s: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html?country=GB 

Keep up to date on the situtation by joining this group on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1593212404329331/

Other Links:

EU gun ban: Danger has not yet passed

Latest EU Meeting Here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160414IPR23130/Committee-on-the-Internal-Market-and-Consumer-Protection

Sign the petition here: https://www.change.org/u/3319283

Working Documents here: http://www.emeeting.europarl.europa.eu/committees/agenda/201604/IMCO/IMCO(2016)0420_1/sitt-2201447

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2015/0269(COD)&l=en#tab-0 

Below is a link to a page that lists all of the EU MEP’s that are involved in the Firearm ban. Please contact them all by email and voice your concerns.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/imco/members.html?action=7 

Here are their emails if you want to send them all at once. Just copy and past them into your To field:

We are trying to raise some money in order to send our Isle of Wight Shooting Team to the 2017 Island Games in Gotland.

For more information, our fundraising website can be found here Gotland Island Games.

Please help if you can, and if you can’t, then please help spread the word.

Thanks

Rob Plested has offered to run a new Hampshire 25yrd benchrest league IAW current NSRA rules.

Initial thoughts?

In order for him to gauge the potential level of interest in such a benchrest league please contact him via email – giving details of your club and how many members might like to take part, also whether you are interested in Air or .22 rim-fire.

Area Reps. please pass the above onto your contacts at the clubs within your respective areas  so that all clubs are made aware and can provide feedback accordingly.

For general info – I’m going to ask Mary to schedule a committee meeting for 8^th Sept, this proposed league will be one of the items on the agenda so it will be good for us to get any feeback by then on the proposal.  IF we get lots of difficult questions about Benchrest I might see about getting Rob to attend the meeting.

Posted on behalf of

Linda Hanna

Chairperson HSBRPA

For more information on the NSRA Benchrest rules, you can download the latest rules here. Section 8 explains the Benchrest rules.

The IWTSA Black-Powder Pistol Competition took place on Sunday 18th August at Newport’s Sainham Range.

The course of fire was 12 shots on each of two PL12 targets at 20 yards, for which the highest 10 shots count. This was for a total of 20 scoring shots to count using inward gauging. All pistols were shot one handed.

The results of the IWTSA Black-Powder Pistol Competition are as follows:

In 1st place: David Atkin  (Newport)  169
In 2nd place: Trevor Bullman (Newport) 117
In 3rd place: Ernie Farrow (Newport) 91

Well done to David Atkin!