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

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 !!