e-mail your MP

[David BASC]

The BASC election site has been updated - The new site should go live sometime between now and tomorrow morning. It will be in the same place on the home page.

 

The site will work in exactly the same way as the election site except that it only covers elected MPs and for the duration of the fall out from the Cumbrian murders the suggested email will reflect these special circumstances.

 

The email expresses the shooting community's concern, explains shooting's importance and offers briefing to the MP. If any of you require any guidance on what to say to your MP let us know.

 

You can of course amend the email and send any message you wish - but please keep it polite. You can also find out whether or not your MP is listed by us as supportive of shooting. If not you can still email them and ask them their view.

 

 

Please use it to make contact with your MP - and please copy any response you get to the email given on the site.

 

If MPs are plugged into their local shooting community they are likely to be far better informed when they come to make decisions in the wake of Cumbria.

 

http://politics.basc.org.uk/

 

 

Many thanks for your support.

 

David

[TonyH]

...The email expresses the shooting community's concern, explains shooting's importance and offers briefing to the MP. If any of you require any guidance on what to say to your MP let us know....

David

May I suggest a conventional letter is better? Emails might have replaced the written/typed letter to a large degree, and I use it all the time myself. But for this purpose I suggest a traditional, longhand or typed letter, posted, makes far more of an impact than "just another email". Anyone in business or public office gets hundreds or thousands of emails weekly: it is very easy to forget or sideline them, especially when they look like some sort of mass mailing based on a standard template. MPs will tell you that nothing, but nothing, beats a personal visit to one of their constituency surgeries, but failing that, a letter** is good. Depressingly few people bother to do either.

TonyH

 

Here's extracts from one I prepared earlier and sent to my new MP - feel free to copy bits if you like them:-

 

I address you now on one of those topics which arouse bitter divisions among (the electorate in this constituency), especially: shooting, and firearms control. I wrote about this to your predecessor quite a few times, and met Anthony Steen on several occasions: he was always sympathetic to the case I made against further (over-) regulation of shooting, and hunting…..

My own lifelong passion for shooting has been disrupted by the 1988 Act, which banned semi-automatic rifles in calibres greater than .22 rimfire; even more by the 1997 Act, which destroyed target handgun shooting; and like hundreds of thousands of other shooters, I observe with trepidation the same mix of ill-informed "instant ban" punditry and rabid authoritarianism, following the appalling events in Cumbria.

Especially since 1996 I take a keen interest in firearms legislation: I am not an expert, and I will not bore you to tears with a protracted essay on the subject!

But anyone who looks into the history of our Firearms Acts since the original 1920 Act - the first meaningful "gun control" in this country - sees immediately the factors which are all too visible in the present furore. The 1920 Act was passed not to deal with armed crime, which was at that time so low that by present standards it barely existed, but because the political establishment feared revolution fomented by anarchists and bolsheviks. Subsequent Acts tended to be consolidating Acts - though with virtually nothing ever presented in the way of evidence that "gun control" had any benefit whatsoever - and kneejerk responses to isolated events such as the first "spree killing" in Hungerford 1987. As our gun laws have become ever more onerous, so has armed crime increased by leaps & bounds - I do not offer any positive correlation between the two things, simply point out that there is no observable link between our "gun control" laws on the one hand, and criminals' misuse of (illegally held) guns, on the other.

On the thankfully rare occasions when these "spree killings" have occurred (three, in twenty-three years) there is a torrent of calls for guns to be "more tightly regulated" or banned altogether: whenever something like this happens, they always want to punish the people who didn't do it…

There are undoubtedly questions to be asked about how & why Bird came to hold a Firearms Certificate (FAC), as there were with Michael Ryan and Thomas Hamilton. After Hungerford, there was no public enquiry: Thames Valley Police were among those arguing strongly against an enquiry, which might have told us much about why a known weirdo held a FAC… After Dunblane, much key evidence was placed under a 100-year secrecy ruling, so we will never know why an even more egregious weirdo, against the repeated advice of junior officers, had his FAC renewed… It is hard not to conclude that shady things went on - and legitimate sporting shooters such as myself were scapegoated.

I could go on. It is a complex subject that barely receives any intelligent, reasonable, fair minded, evidence based analysis, from either politicians or the press.

I was encouraged to hear David Cameron saying at an early stage that it would be a mistake to jump to rash conclusions and move toward yet more facile kneejerk controls. I very much hope that you share his view, and that you will reject the parrot cries for guns to be banned, or somesuch. I would be very happy to point you toward reference sources, or otherwise help, if you wished to look into the subject. And I look forward to meeting you.

[Chris-NZ]

A considered and articulate letter Tony.

It strikes a chord here and I'm sure many Australian shooters would identify with the arguments.

 

Chris-NZ

[Vermincinerator]

Great letter tony and excellent points brought up but i think its much too long.

 

Ian.

[David BASC]

Dear all,

 

Letter, e-mail, personal visit- all are great, use which ever you think fit, but please do somthing.

 

Also, edit whats on the BASC e-mail or indeed Tony's letter as you see fit and as suits you, I am sure Tony won't mind!

 

Although we use a media monitoring service, there is nothing to stop any of you contacting BASC if you spot daft comments in the media so we can respond to them.

 

It may be best to e-mail me so I pick it up at once- my e-mail at BASC is david.ilsley@basc.org.uk

 

If you let us know what the copy reads, the name and date of the paper and the author we can get a formal reply to them, if you can scan in and send a copy with the e-mail that would be great, but i know this may not always be possible.

 

Best wishes

 

David

[TonyH]

Great letter tony and excellent points brought up but i think its much too long.

 

Ian.

I could accept "too long" as fair comment Ian, but I really don't think it can be accused of being "much too long"! The letter as sent is a smidgin over 1.5 sides, with space taken up by headers & footers; it's always a judgement call how much to write, but as a journalist (not a news journo...) I am routinely required to write to a brief, but since I've written a great many letters to politicians I can only judge these according to feedback. Shooting, as we know, is a huge subject: complicate this with firearms law and its UK history, and it would be impossible to give more than a highly selective potted summary in any letter, which is what I tried to do here. I'm not rejecting your criticism! I've been exposed to (constructive) criticism from tough editors, for years.... I just think that since the vast majority of politicians know damn-all about shooting, they have to be told at least some of the basics in a letter like this, so they know where we're coming from. Out of interest, what would you have left out?

Regards, Tony

[David BASC]

Dear All,

 

Just to update you, our Chief Executive, John Swift, has written to the CEO's of the other shooting organisations asking them to work with us and promote the lobbying site to all their members, we are waiting for their replies, which I trust will be positive.

 

David