Thread: Man who shot teen dead in hunting accident 22 years ago loses firearms licence bid

Originally Posted by Moa Hunter

Putting aside for a moment the case of Mr Diack, I don't believe that current firearms training and licencing is sufficient at all. I have never met even one new firearms licence holder who is actually fully up to speed with safe firearms handling. Hopefully the new system under MSC will fix this.
Then as far as field target identification, well we are relying on some silly rods in our eyes to receive refracted/reflected light waves from an object and then for our brains to correctly interpret that information. It is easy for a mistake to be made with visual identification. We must be made aware of the potential for mistakes to be made, how they are made and have a check system. For example the Graf Boys ' Assume everything is Human until you prove otherwise' is vastly superior to Positively identify etc...
So back to Mr Diack if he had undertaken training courses with MSC, assisted at a range and talked at his local school about his mistake. Then he could put his hand on his heart in front of the court and say "this is how I made mistakes leading to the fatal accidental shooting" "I can promise the court and the public that if issued with a firearms licence I will never make a firearms mistake again". That to me would be rehabilitation. Instead he has punched someone over a small debt and even the aspirations to fire chief may have a dark side - We always have two reasons that we do something, The one that we tell everyone and the real one !!

@Moa Hunter

Yes, the presumption of human till otherwise established seems correct, except hunters are tuned in to look for non-human targets, so it is as unnatural/non-intuitive as using your middle finger as trigger finger (although in theory it is the ideal finger for the job what with a straighter tendon, better hold on gun between index/thumb etc, etc).

Blaze colour choice orange vs blue has been debated a lot, but perhaps at the expense of the role of SHAPE, or lack of shape. Whether blue or orange, the current blaze hunting clothes you can buy have unhelpful black disruptive patterns which break up shape. Not super clever if adrenaline charged brains tune into shape and movement. Read: adrenaline may effectively render us partially colour blind - similar to the animals who are supposed not to notice the blaze orange - by focusing attention away from colour and on to size/shape instead!

Never mind that colour vision is poorer in lower light dusk/dawn situations. Uniformly coloured orange or blue blaze is then more likely to save your life, because your shape is less broken up.

Blaze orange:


Blaze orange, grayscale, notice the effect of the disruptive black patterns in breaking up body shape: