Recently, the National Coalition for Gun Control’s spokesperson Samantha Lee was on television, once again espousing her objection to the shooting sports. Among other things, she argued that civilians do not need self-loading handguns and that sporting shooters only require ‘one shot’ to participate in shooting competitions.

Previous experience has shown us that anti-gun groups don’t always properly research their subject matter or check facts before they begin their frantic tirades against private firearm ownership and the shooting sports. Indeed, these groups are often just plain wrong when it comes to commenting on the many and varied activities involved in our chosen sport. These groups apparently also believe that the Olympic or Commonwealth Games are the only arenas for sports shooting.

Recognising this, I would like to use this month’s editorial to set the record straight about what many of the SSAA’s shooting competitions actually involve.

The SSAA has more than a dozen shooting competitions with many categories and matches in each one and many thousands of Australian shooters participating in them each month. These competitions and their related matches require the use of many different types of firearms, from shotguns, pistols and revolvers to rimfire, centrefire, air and black powder rifles.In Action Match, an international competition in which the SSAA regularly competes and does extremely well in, the competitors use both revolvers and self-loading pistols to engage the targets. In the Falling Plates section of Action Match, 48 shots are fired at metal plate targets in timed events.

In competitions such as Single Action, competitors engage metallic targets with revolvers and lever-action rifles. These targets are placed at various distances and the competitor’s score is calculated by the number of targets hit and the amount of time taken to engage them.

The SSAA also competes in Target Pistol, which requires 10 shots to be fired in as little as 40-second and 20-second strings of fire during the course.

Furthermore, despite what Ms Lee says, even the various Commonwealth Games shooting competitions require shooters to fire multiple shots. Their 25m Pistol competition includes a Precision event and a Rapid Fire event, with each consisting of six stages of five shots for a total of 30 shots.

The SSAA rifle and shotgunning competitions also require multiple shots. Field Rifle consists of 42 shots taken at various targets and distances in timed events, while Lever Action is designed around fast, accurate shots with all types of lever-action rifles utilised. In most field shotgun competitions such as 5-Stand, a competitor requires a shotgun that can deliver a quick second shot to obtain a score if the target is missed on the first attempt.

Clearly, there are many competitions at club, state, national and international levels that involve shooters taking multiple shots at targets. We suspect that the National Coalition for Gun Control’s misinformed statements about the ‘needs’ of competitive shooters and what the shooting sports apparently involve is just another ploy by the anti-gun groups to confuse the non-shooting public and that their real agenda is, in fact, to ban all firearms, one at a time, handgun to longarm, multiple-shot to single-shot, until there are no legal firearms left. Of course, this does nothing to curb illegal firearms, which may still be used by unlicensed shooters in criminal activities.

The only way to counteract the misinformation of the anti-gun brigade is through public education and hands-on experience. Perhaps we should send the National Coalition for Gun Control a copy of our new SSAA’s Comprehensive Guide to Shooting & Hunting in Australia, which details all of the SSAA’s shooting competitions? We doubt they would bother to read it though!