Alpha1 wrote:I am just wondering what Erika might be making of all this it started of as a request to sign a petition and rapidly turned in to a bun fight yet again.
Hi. I've just skimmed some of the latest updates, after a night out; a full response to the comments individually or as a whole can wait for when I am less tired, if I feel its required, but having spent the last hour liaising with colleagues to mobilize more support for the campaign and its petition, it is quite sad to see such negativity and time wasted which could be put to much better use, either with respect to this campaign or another positive action to the benefit of shooting.
With the possibility of rare exceptions, no one here as far as I know, personally knows the team behind Firearms UK, so people don't know our own individual personal circumstances, but it has been made clear both here and elsewhere that we are a 100% volunteer organisation, consequently at least in my own view it is entirely ridiculous to try to discredit our efforts by comparing them to what a collaborative effort of funded organisations can achieve, when they have capital, a stable revenue and paid staff to facilitate it. Even more so as we do not compete with any established shooting organisation, in fact we support them all in what ways we can and the team behind Firearms UK are members of existing organistions in addition to giving time and money to build Firearms UK as their way to promoting and defending shooting within the UK.
Rather than people costantly being negative, perhaps people should look for the positives, consider what we have achieved or at least what we are trying to do and put this into perspective; we've been going 1 year not, 5, 10 or 20, we funded ourselves by donating our own money we are not lottery assisted and don't have a paying membership to support us, the merchandise we sell to support our growth where initially funded out of our own pocket. We are not paid staff, instead we volunteer our spare time and energy to a cause we are passionate about and juggle work, family life and other commitments around it.
We do what we can, and if everyone did something positive, something constructive rather than all the negativity shooting in the UK would potentially be on much safer ground.
