Dear fellow IPSC shooters and friends,
As many of you have heard already, IPSC shooting (in fact all Dynamic shooting disciplines) are about to be prohibited in the Netherlands!
This new law will be voted on in a matter of weeks, and if it p. ? will mean the end of our sport in Holland, and who knows ? this decision may well spread quickly across the EU.
As you can imagine, the NPSA (the Dutch IPSC organization) is mobilizing every possible resource to fight this unjust proposed law, but it is a desperate battle. The odds are stacked against us.
We need your help!
There is a petition being signed (online) which will be submitted along with other material as we try to make our case for our sport.
You can help by going online and signing this petition. The more signatures we have, the better.
Please also take a moment to forward this email to anyone you can think of who could generate more signatures, your shooting range, your club, your federation, your local gunsmiths who may be able to send it on to their mailing list. Post it online on any website you have access to.
We want to show that IPSC is a serious sport, with thousands of participants worldwide.
Please take a minute to log onto this site:
http://petities.nl/petitie/dynamische-disciplines-moeten-blijven Scroll down, where it says ?Ik? ? you fill in your name
- Where it says ?wonede te? you fill in your city and country.
- Tick the checkbox if you want to allow your name to be shown on the list.
- Enter your email address
- And click the yellow box ?ondertekenen? to sign the petition.
Many thanks for your participation in our fight.
Best Regards,
Saul Kirsch
General Manager
Double-Alpha Academy B.V.
Hello!
Firstly the instructions given for signing the petition were not complete and I apologise for that.
These were the original instructions, which are fine, so far as they go:
Please take a minute to log onto this site:
http://petities.nl/petitie/dynamische-disciplines-moeten-blijven Scroll down, where it says Ik you fill in your name
- Where it says wonede te you fill in your city and country.
- Tick the checkbox if you want to allow your name to be shown on the list.
- Enter your email address
- And click the yellow box ondertekenen to sign the petition.
The crucial point is that you must confirm your signature, or it will not count. After you have clicked on the yellow signature box ondertekenen, an email will promptly be sent to you from the government petition site. This email will have a sentence in Dutch asking you to confirm your signature U kunt uw ondertekening bevestigen door op deze zin te klikken, which must be clicked.
Secondly I have had many inquiries as to why the Dutch would do such a thing. Icarus van der Kolk has given this explanation:
First off the Dutch situation is a bit weird so here goes:
To own a gun you have to be a member of a private body called the Royal Dutch Shooting Association (KNSA) under the directorship of Lord Greven (remember that gun control here was introduced to keep the royalists armed and the socialist unarmed). As a member you dont get to vote for or against the board of directors. Just to give you a feeling for the organisation they publish reports with titles like 'Kaf & Koren' that means something like 'Keeping Out the Riff Raff'.
According to KNSA rules you further need to be in serious active competition and train at least 18x a year (stamped and signed for), you can only have guns that you use in that active competition.
Their tactic for combating gun control was based on telling the public that guns are dangerous and have no place in the general society except for strictly regulated serious sportsmen. If you said something like 'natural right of self defence' you would almost certainly be kicked out and your guns taken away because you would be considered at risk of abusing you position as sportsman.
The ban itself:
The KNSA has always hated the modern non-Olympic shooting sports and had all sorts of stupid rules that prevented say cowboy action shooters from wearing cowboy outfits for fear of a bad image.
Basically the KNSA decided in an agreement with the Justice Minister to ban all dynamic shooting/ shooting where the shooter moves and therefore it in effect banned the possession of the guns used for this as well (you can only own guns for active competition). This was simply done without any law being changed or any democratic controls.
The strange thing is that we had a government-held meeting a couple of months ago of police, firearms experts and criminologists that basically came to the conclusion that no new rules were needed (well apart from not giving a registered and known madman a gun by a police a officer that had been suspended and fired for corruption in the line of duty (selling off confiscated guns)).
The whole issue had become mute as the police were not pushing it for obvious reasons and the left wing parties didnt have any interest the matter of weapons law apart from the usual pushing for a ban on arms export to Israel (its a pet hobby for them). I in the meantime noticed that after the meeting the Minister had ordered his civil servants and KNSA to re-evaluate the Dutch shooting sports in a closed setting. Normally I can always find somebody who will leak information about what is going on (small country and even smaller shooting community) but in this was not the case here so I tried some freedom of information requests but they have already finished before I could finish court proceedings.
The outcome was a lot of non-nonsensical restrictions like new psychological tests and even more active and regimented competition as well as the following (my translation kept close to the original Dutch):
No Combat in Shooting sports
Shooting sports must be kept clean of training that can be useful for the offensive use of firearms. This type of offensive training and weapons and (camouflage) clothing can have an undesirable effect and can be attractive to the wrong element. This therefore requires strict regulation. Everything has to be done to prevent a solecistic threat, also know as a 'Lone Wolve' [thats the spelling in the document not mine] from acquiring weapons and skills by way of the shooting sports. By way of the Olympic and non offensive nature of the sport Biathlon is exempt.
No new licenses will be issued and the current owners of such guns will have a grace period to keep shooting until November after which they have to keep their guns in the safe, no shooting, no selling, no inheriting. This is a smart move as they are then not required to give any compensation because the guns have technically not been taken away or nationalised.
I am working hard trying to think of a way to tackle the current situation but I believe it may be to late as the ground work should have been slowly laid down many years ago. There is also no way to mount any effective legal challenges so for the moment I will focus on trying to lobby the Justice Ministers party MP's to try and do something (most shooters vote for this party and they will maybe loose a seat in parliament).
Some European Shooting Organisations
During the 1980s and 90s I attended quite a lot of AFTSC (Association de Federation de Tir Sportif de la CE) meetings in Nuremberg and one in Brussels, as well as the final dissolution meeting in 2009. The Secretary-General was a S. Duisterhof, who was also a senior official in the KNSA. At a superficial level he seemed a pleasant, cultured man, but as soon as I got to know him at all well, it became clear that he was a strong believer in gun control and in as many restrictions and as much bureaucracy as could be devised.
Sadly KNSA is not the only shooting organisation doing its best to destroy sport shooting. 3 years ago I had lunch in Nuremberg with Goran Nygren, Secretary-General of the Swedish Sport Shooting Federation and Tommy Sorensen of the Danish Shooting Union and was disappointed to find that neither appeared to have ever done any serious reading into the costs and effects of gun control but strongly believed in it; and both were firm believers in m. of restrictions and bureaucracy. I have not made the effort to find out how they personally, or their organisations, are funded, but I strongly suspect that it is by, or through their respective governments, rather than as a result of thriving shooting activities, or increasing membership.
Sorry about all this depressing stuff.
Regards
Derek
Derek Bernard
