Originally Posted by
Frog
What I'm saying is I'm already a member of a club and already have insurance. I can not see how the NSRA would make me pay them for membership and for their insurance. I would say they can not enforce it. The NSRA does not write law.
The only thing they could do is tell clubs you are not affiliated to us unless you require your members to pay us for membership and you can not take place in our comps unless your members pay up - i.e. they would have to have the club be their enforcers rather than enforce it themselves. Some clubs might say 'no thanks' and the whole thing could backfire.
They need to be really careful. The motivation for this appears to be they are a failing organisation in terms of membership and income. The long term answer to that is not to try to make people pay it is to do things people want to pay for and probably to cut waste. I'm a non NSRA member but belong to an affliated FT club (for insurance purposes I think).
That's exactly the proposal. The NSRA makes it a condition of affiliation that the club registers all members. Just as RFU Clubs (even down the bottom at Lvl 12) have to register their players and ArcheryGB sign up all members automatically (at a cost of £47/head).
Your club has the choice to go off and affiliate to NRA if it prefers. It is a choice for the club to make - if the majority of the club vote in favour of it then you have the choice to go along with the group or find another club - just as if the committee proposed a £35 increase in subs and the AGM approved it. You would have the choice to pay the raised subs or find a new club. Of course the NRA may follow suit, in which case you simply get a choice of which way to affiliate.
Originally Posted by
Frog
Some clubs might say 'no thanks' and the whole thing could backfire.
They need to be really careful. The motivation for this appears to be they are a failing organisation in terms of membership and income. The long term answer to that is not to try to make people pay it is to do things people want to pay for and probably to cut waste. I'm a non NSRA member but belong to an affliated FT club (for insurance purposes I think).
The clubs that would say "no thanks" are likely ones with few to no individual members already anyway. Club Affiliations account for less than 25% of the NSRA's "Membership Income". Losing a few club affiliations is not a problem if they sign up sufficient members at other clubs.
They have ~800 affiliated clubs at the moment. My back-of-a-napkin maths suggests that they only need ~300 clubs to sign up to this to break-even with their current income (which shows just how pitifully they are being funded by the community at the moment).
Given that this is a preliminary proposal and requires refinement, there's a lot of scope for developing buy-in. FT Clubs are basically unaccounted for at the moment and I agree entirely that the NSRA do a very poor job looking after FT (though they obviously also need to avoid stepping on the toes of the BFTA, it's a unique arrangement of being separate but cooperative which is not working quite right at the moment). If they sat down and were able to work out a sensible and mutually-acceptable deal with the BFTA then that's immediately 70-odd clubs signing up their membership. There are a few gaping holes in their plan which - if filled - make the whole endeavour look fairly sensible. If BFTA want to go off and do their own insurance again, then they can - but they stopped doing it precisely because it was a PITA and the NSRA were able to get them a better deal. I've seen a few comments along the lines of "the NRA and NSRA does sod all for clubs". As far as cartridge shooting goes, your clubs would not exist without the NRA and NSRA because you wouldn't have insurance-acceptable range construction/maintenance guidelines, which means you wouldn't be able to get insurance, which means no sane person would ever volunteer to run a club and personally shoulder the liability risk!
I fully agree the NSRA have taken rather a stick (not carrot) approach over the last few years and been woefully uninventive and uninspiring. I have reason to be tentatively hopeful that this is changing given some recent significant changes on the Board of Management though I continue to have doubts about the CEO. Obviously they need to walk the walk and prove themselves to the community and I continue to beat them with a stick on a regular basis.
But I also think this is the way forward for the sport. You can't expect to be represented in Parliament or have the NSRA fight off airgun licensing if you don't join them. The sport has to pay for that. YOU AND I have to pay for that.
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." Sigmund Freud
Shooting is my meditation
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