We can't even get our associations to run a story so what hope do we have with the national media? Honestly, it is a lot harder than you think. The average editor/reader/ person in the UK know very little about shooting, don't like what they may know and has no interest in knowing any more.
When I was checking a shotgun in at the Emirates desk at Heathrow on the Fri for Dubai, we had a slight wait for the security guys to come and take the gun through security. The polite young chap behind the check in desk asked, "Excuse me, and I hope you don't mind me asking, but how can guns be considered "sporting goods"?
He now knows! Only 65,000,000 more to go. Allowing for the CPSAs 20k ish members and BASCs 140,000.
Dunc, that anecdote about airport security highlights the problem particularly well. Shotguns are not seen as a sporting item, they are regarded as a weapon.
We can look at the 65,000,000 and say it's their fault for being ignorant, or we can set out to educate and inform. I understand that a low profile event in some farmers field somewhere has limited appeal, I really get that. To try and promote the sport on the back of that is tough, but Dubai was like a gift on a Christmas tree, especially with Cheryl's brilliant win.
"British woman wins in the worlds biggest shooting competition, with a prize fund of $2,000,000 and supported by the crown prince of Dubai." That is bread and butter for any PR person, to get that in the press doesn't get any easier.
I don't suggest that it is an easy gig overall, but if we let opportunities like this sail by then that is a shocking inditement of the appetite for our shooting org's to try and actually make a difference. Doing absolutely nothing makes it an impossible task to educate the 65,000,000, but every successful campaign started with a first step.
Maybe they are happy to sit back and work out classifications and update records, maybe they are content to simply deal with a pre-conditioned and favourable audience and not try and do anything more because it might be a bit difficult or mean trying something new, but there lies the road to further marginalisation and decline.
Look at the amount of views this topic alone has had on this forum, the appetite of the shooting community to find out what was happening in Dubai and cheer for our own was huge. It is a manifest failure of the shooting org's to capitalise on that even if it was just limited to an already established audience.
I daresay that it will get a mention in one of the monthly magazines weeks after the event and when any momentum has been lost.
