Who We Actually Are
There is a picture of the Australian firearms owner that exists in the public mind, and it is largely wrong.
It is rural, male, older, and vaguely political. Parts of that are true of parts of us. As a description of 76,000 people in this state, it is nowhere close.
This week I want to talk about who our members actually are, because we cannot represent people well if we do not know them, and we cannot correct the public picture if we have not looked at the real one.
The spread
Our membership runs from juniors shooting their first competition to people in their eighties who have been at it for sixty years. It includes target shooters who have never hunted and hunters who have never entered a competition. Collectors whose interest is historical. Farmers for whom a firearm is a tool. Competitors who travel interstate and members who shoot four times a year at one range.
It is metropolitan as well as rural and regional. A very large number of our members live in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong and drive out to shoot, which is a fact that surprises people who assume this is exclusively a country sport.
It runs across every occupation you can think of. Tradespeople, nurses, police, teachers, engineers, doctors, farmers, small business owners, public servants, retirees. There is no firearms owner type. There is a cross section of the state.
We are not a demographic. We are a sample of the population that happens to have gone through a licensing process.
Why this matters for representation
A membership this varied is a real challenge to represent, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
What a competitive pistol shooter in western Sydney needs from this association is not what a field hunter outside Moree needs, and neither is what a collector needs. Policy that helps one group can be a matter of indifference to another and occasionally a problem for a third.
My commitment on that is straightforward. We will not quietly favour the loudest group, we will continue to support all. We will not tell any section of the membership that their part of the sport does not matter. It all matters, and the association exists for all of it.
Where we have work to do
Two things are worth naming honestly.
The first is age. Like most sporting organisations in this country, our membership skews older than the population, and the pipeline of new and young shooters is the single biggest determinant of what this association looks like in twenty years. That is not a crisis today. It becomes one if we keep assuming it will sort itself out.
The second is that the sport is still overwhelmingly male, and the proportion of women in it does not reflect anything about the sport itself. Firearms shooting is one of the few activities where physical strength is close to irrelevant and where there is no good reason for the imbalance to exist. That is a topic worth its own column, and it will get one next week. With that said, we are starting to see an increase in female participation.
What the numbers do for us
There is a practical reason to understand our own membership, beyond self knowledge.
When we walk into a minister’s office, the most useful thing we can put on the table is an accurate picture of who is affected by a decision. Not an assertion that firearms owners will be unhappy, but a description of which electorates, which occupations, which age groups and how many. Members of parliament respond to their own constituents in a way they do not respond to an interest group, and a membership spread across every seat in the state is a far stronger argument than a membership they can imagine as a bloc somewhere else.
That is one of the quieter reasons your membership matters even in years when you barely shoot. You are a number in an electorate, and that number is part of the case.
The correction worth making
When the subject comes up in conversation, the single most useful thing you can do is complicate the picture.
Not with an argument. With a fact. That the person they are talking to is a nurse, or an engineer, or lives in the suburbs, or is a woman in her thirties, or took it up at sixty. The stereotype survives because it is never contradicted by anybody the person knows.
We are not who they think we are. The simplest way to demonstrate that is to be visible about being ourselves.
Until next week: keep ’em on target, in the field and on the range!
Jai Rowell
President — SSAA NSW
WHAT YOU TELL ME MATTERS MOST – ASK THE PRESIDENT
Every week I hear from members and branches, by phone, by email, and standing around at ranges. If you ask me what the most important part of this job is, that is it. Listening to members. Everything else follows from it.
So, I want to open up another avenue. If you have a burning question about SSAA NSW, your membership, your discipline, or where we are heading, send it through to me at jai.rowell@nsw.ssaa.org.au. Each week I will publish a selection of the questions I receive and answer them here, straight, in this column.
No question is too basic and none of them are off limits. If you are wondering about it, chances are a few thousand other members are wondering the same thing
ABOUT THIS COLUMN
Each week I pull up a seat at the bench to talk about what’s happening across SSAA NSW, the wins, the setbacks, what’s on the political radar, and my thoughts on whatever is front of mind, from the matters members are raising with me to whatever is shaping the sport that week. I’ll put our volunteers where they belong, at the front, because they’re the backbone of everything we do, and I’ll back the industry that keeps our sport strong. The promise is in the name: plain talk, no spin, and I’ll always tell it to you straight.
