Who needs enemies when you have friends like shooter, hunter, hunting club president and firearm dealer Jim Pirie, who says hunters are coming to shoot farmers’ sheep?
Pirie played a major part in an ABC 7.30 Report story that aired last night, and the disaffected former Shooters Party candidate damned hunters licensed by the Game Council, saying, “We don’t know what they’ll shoot. They’ll shoot your sheep or shoot anything. Or themselves.”
In his opinion, “the danger of somebody getting shot is fairly high,” but I don’t know what figures or studies he’s based this on. If any.
This is the same bloke who reckons R-licence holders are elitists. He has had a prickly relationship with a number of hunting and shooting organisations and is a good man for the media to go to if they want the dissenting view within the hunting community.
I’m all for debate and dissent, but Jim’s opinion is the last thing we need right now while our real opponents are on the warpath and living on the advice of Joseph Goebbels, who said any lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.
On top of the utter garbage turned out by the AWU and GetUp!, we also have Greens MP David Shoebridge continuing his unending whine about law-abiding firearm owners, now harping on about firearm buyers and having a “good reason” to buy. Again, he’s misleading the public and making an issue of something that, well, isn’t. But he’s getting media coverage from those journos who don’t check the veracity of his claims before peddling his lines.
The AWU’s Russ Collison can’t even do the research to spell either of Davey Crockett’s names correctly, let along get his facts right on hunting on public land in NSW.
GetUp! utterly destroys its credibility in its campaign based on lies and distortions. I spoke this morning to a GetUp! spokesperson who said the campaign came at the instigation of members and groups like the National Parks Association, which is notoriously against hunting in national parks.
It’s clear from the conversation GetUp! did no research into the situation before launch the ad, which claims hunting will be too dangerous to countenance. How they can say this is beyond me, since no one yet knows how the system will operate and what controls will be in place. I suspect it’s all NPA spin.
“I’m willing to look at all sides,” the spokesperson said, saying the GetUp! campaign was “evidence based” and opening the door for me to send info to her. She said GetUp! was simply trying to begin the debate about hunting in national parks (it seems to be well underway, from what I can see) and would take part in a “more nuanced debate” once the full details of the system were announced.
We’ll see, but I don’t feel confident that ‘nuanced’ is the same as ‘rational’. It may be closer to ‘opinionated’ if it’s driven by the NPA et al. The fact is there’s a strong body of opinion out there that just doesn’t want hunting in national parks, no matter what.
Jim Pirie says “most of his customers agree that shooting in national parks is a bad idea,” according to the ABC.
That may well be true, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that people like me refuse to be one of his customers.
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