Is it too easy for under 18s to obtain IFs and RIFs?

[sp00n]

One obvious way to start this process is to stop referring to them as "guns". A paintball 'gun' is a "marker". What about 'tagger' for our equipment?

 

How about "Hit'er" .... oooh wait

 

while i do like this idea, the problem we have is we have too diverse a selection of wepons/guns etc to band all of them under one name

[JoW.]

I was never in contact directly with the powers that be so I never really understood the rationale behind why airsofters had to represent themselves to genpop politicians as martial arts club members. All respect to the guys who got the defence written in against what seemed (at times) to be the most pigheaded and obtuse set of political interests who were on the upper hand, as it must have taken nerves of steel and the patience of a parent handling 20 screaming toddlers in a room at 4am. Given the high status of re-enactment at the time, and the long established presence of large LARPs which are socially accepted and (more importantly) considered harmless, I argued at the time that airsoft was more properly aligned with those two things than with martial arts. However, I think there was a stronger desire on the part of airsofters generally to distinguish themselves from the 'underage kids with single shot M4s shooting each other in the back garden' and to be taken seriously, hence martial arts sports club angle. Sites felt it would help to boost their business by making attendance mandatory and retailers hoped that fear of Customs confiscations would help stop direct imports from the UK.

 

Ultimately, though, it was always going to result in airsoft being whittled down from the open community with high levels of intake (and churn) to a much more closed off, club based activity. The reason I don't think this worked to the advantage of airsoft is because, unlike martial arts or shooting, airsofting isn't really a skill you learn where the result is some form of self improvement, but something you do together with lots of other people to have fun (like LARP). Cutting out the casual entrants has just made airsoft a less appealing activity in comparison to other socially based leisure activities where you don't necessarily have to go through mandatory attendance sessions to be part of the community.

 

In Switzerland, all males over a certain age receive military training and are then liable for reservist duty (and annual camp) until they reach a certain age. They have normalised firearms by providing nationwide training on military firearms and requiring military service. The weird Swiss paranoia about defence and separateness is what makes the Swiss strange in other ways. In Canada, hunting is normalised, and firearms are seen as a tool for hunting, which is why sporting firearms ownership is acceptable, but ownership of firearms or guns that look like assault rifles is not. In Canada, the path towards owning a sporting firearm is far easier than trying to acquire an airsoft gun, with the result that Canadian airsofters are often making the same arguments vis-a-vis the actual harm inflicted by an airsoft gun vs a baseball bat which fall on equally deaf ears.

 

Incidentally, in Denmark, large groups of people play the assassination game which people voluntarily sign up to. You get a name and you have to find this person in real life. You track them for a while in their real lives, and then you have to find a good moment to 'assassinate' them with a realistic imitation weapon (rubber knife or single shot airsoft pistol). They may, in turn, go to work or wherever armed with a similar realistic imitation weapon to fight you off.

[TacMaster]

Ownership of weapons in Switzerland is more than normalised- the Swiss public have an extremely casual attitude to them! I was in Geneva in February and one of the most lasting memories of that trip was seeing a group of Swiss army personnel casually walking down a street from the train station with loaded Sig assault rifles slung behind them- the other people on the pavement didn't even bat an eyelid!

 

Granted, that may have been a very normal thing to happen in Switzerland, but if the MoD allowed serving members of our armed forces to do the same here, there would be a completely different reaction.