From Irish Shooting Politics:
Once again, the country is going to the polls. And once again, some 200,000 shooters aren’t hearing very much on the candidates’ parties’ policies with regards to firearms licencing and so forth.
Thought I’d ask, and see who responded first and fastest and most favourably, so on twitter the following was sent to Labour, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, all at the same time:
@fiannafailparty What is #FiannaFail‘s policy on the Firearms Act, the handgun ban and private firearms ownership?#ge11
http://twitter.com/#!/MarkDennehy/status/36815632360017920
http://twitter.com/#!/MarkDennehy/status/36814738566561792
@labour What is #Labour‘s policy on the Firearms Act, the handgun ban and private firearms ownership? #ge11
To give credit where it’s due, Labour did in fact respond in minutes, saying that they’d need to get back with a more complete answer and that wouldn’t happen until Monday; fair enough. No response from Fianna Fail or Fine Gael either, but just in case that they’re not as au fait with twitter as you’d expect, this was sent to their email accounts as well:
Hi,
As an Olympic target shooter, I’d like to ask for details on Fine Gael’s policies and plans with regards to the Firearms Act, the handgun ban and private firearms ownership in Ireland, and to invite you to engage with the target shooting and hunting community on shooting.boards.ie to discuss these matters. With some 200,000 licenced firearms owners in the state, I think such engagement would be appropriate during the election campaign.
Regards,
If there’s a response, I’ll post it here, and over on shooting.boards.ie where all three parties will be invited to engage with the shooting community on their firearms policies. The cynic would insist such an effort would be wasted; though experience would tend to weigh the cynic’s viewpoint heavily in this area, the experiment does still seem worthy of an attempt at this time.