Winter 2002 - National Rifle Association

ATTRATTRACTINGNEWMEMBERSby Malcolm Brown, Chairman Carshalton Rifle ClubThe following article was written as a reply to a questionnaire sent out to clubs in the London and South-East Region bytheir Regional Representative Chris Law and was referred to in his report on page 14 in the Summer 2002 Journal.Attracting new people into the sport needs to be takenseriously at club level and must have the support of allmembers. All old prejudices and ideas need to bescrapped and a fresh approach needs to be made. TheGun Control Network and other protest groups havemade it quite plain that they will not rest until they havedestroyed all target sports. Now all clubs andindividuals have got two choices: fight back with all thelegal means possible or roll over and die. Unfortunatelytoo many clubs have taken the second option. I amdelighted to say that my own club members refused totake this attitude and appointed myself and theSecretary, Ian Stockley, to look at ways and means topreserve the future of the club.With the banning of pistols, the club suffered a morethan two-thirds drop in membership and our first taskwas to try and stem the loss of members and build themembership back up again. Before evoking a plan ofaction, a complete survey of the range was done to seethat everything was up to specification. The range, beingconstructed in 1972, was in reasonably good conditiondue in part to the efforts of past Secretaries making surethat regular maintenance was carried out. The one majorthing that required immediate attention was thatsomehow toilet facilities for disabled shooters had beenoverlooked.We sought advice from the local health authority whofurnished us with details on what was required to meetcurrent legislation. Conversion of the ladies toilet wascarried out and, when complete, we asked two disabledshooters from another club that uses our range to inspectall of the disabled facilities and report back to us anyfailings we may have missed. Other than an alterationto a wheelchair ramp, there were none. This type ofwork is necessary, if not vital, and any club who ignoresproviding disabled facilities does so at their peril. NRAofficials have probably wondered why we are so insistenton ladies and disabled toilet facilities being open whenwe visit Bisley. We are only trying to make them awarethat the Disabilities Discrimination Act will require allsporting venues to provide facilities for disabled peopleby 2003. Venue does not just mean major complexessuch as soccer and cricket grounds or Bisley, it alsoapplies to clubs, and to ignore the Act could lead to aclub being closed. I know of one club in the GreaterLondon area whose members were lucky enough toobtain a grant to rebuild their range. However, theyfound themselves getting the final part of the grantwithheld as they had neglected to install a chairlift. Thevarious discrimination acts are a minefield of legislationand it is very easy to overlook certain aspects. One hasonly to witness how the golf clubs have fallen foul ofthe Sexual Discrimination Act to see what I mean.78Now consider what to do about attracting new members.We realised that to get potential members interested, wehad to extend our activities to cover other disciplines oftarget sports, not just stick to .22 prone rifle - in otherwords, diversify. Now what first was the question weasked ourselves. A check of our club guns showed wehad two gallery rifles in .22 and .38 calibre. These hadonly been used occasionally in the past, so it was decidedto encourage the membership to try out this differentdiscipline. To start off with, we invited our old pistolmembers to try out this new (to them) discipline. Thiscourse of action took a lot of persuasive talking and, attimes, outright bribery, but we were pleased to find thatwe managed to get three of our old members to rejointhe club. With a growing interest also being shown byour normally dedicated .22 prone shooters, we soonfound ourselves with a thriving gallery rifle section.Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. At club level,we can no longer allow one discipline to dominateanother. Sadly, this is exactly what happened with manyclubs prior to the pistol ban with the result that whenthe ban was enforced, people gave up and refused evento consider taking up another discipline. I have got bittermemories of people saying things like “that’s it, theyhave taken my pistols away, sell up all the assets andlet’s have a share out.” Unfortunately, many clubs didexactly this. The same situation could happen again,too many clubs have adopted a fortress attitude and arerefusing to alter their old ways. I’ve witnessed too manyinstances where clubs do not encourage youngsters - “wedon’t want damn kids running about the place”; women- “they are only fit to make the tea, anyway I come hereto get away from them”; ethnic minorities - “someonepass me the smelling salts”. Go on, admit it, you’veheard these remarks too.We now turned our attention to what else we could do.One of the clubs using our range had introduced airpistol, to replace cartridge pistol, as one of their activitiesafter the ban. Taking a leaf out of their books, it wasdecided to add this activity to our range of disciplines.We had a stroke of luck when an air pistol turning targetframe was discovered gathering dust in a member’sgarage. The frame was recovered, overhauled, and putback into use.With these new activities up and running, we felt it wasnow the time to try to encourage the non-shooting publicto take up the sport. But how? In a word, ‘advertise’.Advertising can take many forms and if a proper planof action is not drawn up, considerable sums of moneycan be wasted. To start, we looked at ways to get ourclub known with a minimum cost outlay. A check wasmade to see if we were still listed with the Leisure