Re: [Ag-waffenrecht] IPSC-Verbot und Einschränkung in NL

[Cathy <Cathy AT news.piratenpartei.de>]

Weitere Erkenntnisse:

An in-depth explanation from Derek Bernard who fights hard for shooters 
around the world.

Hello!
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 don’t 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 didn’t 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' [that’s 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 1980’s and ‘90’s 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 masses 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