Thread: Mountain Safety Council Firearms Course

Yep your right. My uncle and my cousin have done the two courses in Scotland. Quite tough to get the top scores .Subsequently my uncle helped the local organiser for the next few courses.once, one of the candidates was a woman who was struggling with her shooting and could not hit the target were she was meant to. My uncle helped her and she managed to go through that part. she was safe in the way she used her rifle but never had a chance to have access to a shooting range and to be taught properly.
Those two courses definitely raise the level of knowledge of the people released in the woods with a rifle over there.
But as you mentioned , over there deers talkers are quite often on their own on a certain block of land and there are no other hunter in the vicinity to get mistaken for a deer and shot at.
In France we have a good number of accidents every year due to hunting. And guess what, most of the time it happens during big game driven shoots ( wild boar, red deer and roe deer) where multiple hunters are occupying a same parcel of wood and one of them is not respecting the shooting directions. There is no intense hunting courses over there. Just a basic hunting exam with a shot gun practical test where you have to show safe handling and fire two shots.
On the target shooting side of things in France, the number of death must be 1 out of 150000 participants over a ten year period.and the level of serious injuries is low as well. The mendatory insurance that the shooters have to pay every year when they renew their licence is the equivalent of $5.

I am not sure that a course like in the UK would make people in the woods safer but they would make them more knowledgeable hunters.
How ever a firearm handling course within the first year of newbies getting their licence ( being on a target range for the ones who do not wish to hunt and in the field for the hunters) and a refresher every ten years when we renew ours licence would not be a bad thing.
The first year you could be on your "learner's", which allows you to acquire your gun of choice and ammunitions and practice on shooting ranges or farm lands handling and shooting. When you feel ready and confident you pass your firearm handling course that then allows you to apply for doc permits to hunt on public land ( or allows you to compete on different ranges if you are a target shooter).

But as said in the precedent post, it could become a pen in the but to do and run all those practical courses.
But it is probably better if we sort out our shit ourselves rather than having it imposed upon us in a more costly and drastic way.