German journalist learning to shoot

call me extremely wary and overly cautious, but...
1. only a couple other members expressed concern of this out of the blue “ to understand the fasination” request from a foreign national,
2. if OP is an accredited journalist for ‘stern’ and in Vegas during Shot Show wouldn’t it be easier to facilitate a live fire shooting event (bigger the better) from the exhibitors?
3. this individual has a photojournalist to take photos of what? safety opps? slip of the tongue against the political climate & admistration? mishandling? markmanship skills exhibited?or perhaps the safety briefing? or ?
4. set their silly derrières in an 8 hour NRA basic pistol class to learn safe firearm handling, different types of handguns, ad nauseam, as well as the skills and knowledge before they go to the range.

a thought would you invite your neighbour, you know the one you won’t loan the lawnmower to, to the range to shoot with you? you folks have spent hours listening to grandpa/ma, your parents, show you firearm handling, you have taken numerous classes over the years, you have spent a lifetime invested in showing everyone your skills - yet this bloke only wants to see ‘the fascination’.

everyone’s spidey senses should be tingling like mad over this last minute ad hoc request to photograph Americans and their guns, especially after ‘stern’ posted in april 17 our president in an Nazi salute ‘stern’ is unabashedly anti trump, (don’t care who you voted for last election he is the president of this great country)
http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/25/german-magazine-doesnt-hold-back-with-their-anti-trump-cover-6878753/

hypothetically, you wish to be associated with a “pre-arranged” non-lethal AD or NG involving a foreign national journalist while his photojournalist snaps away!

critical thinking and some common sense should prevail shouldn’t?

Not a bad point of view. Checking the background of a journalist asking for assistance is always appropriate.

As a personal experience, I volunteered to guide a BBC film crew through a moose hunt in Finland back in 2007. The request was submitted to NRA and as the least senior member of the board at the time I was more or less given the task. The interviews and filming went great, they even got footage of a driven moose walking towards the camera and being downed some 25 yards in front of them. Campfire conversations, rifle maintenance, my kids studying for the hunters' exam; the works.

The result? A heavily edited two-minute section of one of my interviews in the woods, in full hunting gear, in a one-hour Soviet TASS All Union Programme -class "documentary" of a then-recent mass shooting in Finland, aired 3-5 times a day for a couple of weeks on a variety of international/satellite BBC channels. The main focus was interviews of family members of the victims and the reporter's narrative and the idea how Finns can be so uncivilized that so many of them want to own guns in the first place, not to mention to also kill wild animals with them. I've even come across that piece-of-you-know-what as recently as last fall, it seems to keep haunting me forever.

Only later we researched the backgrounds of the reporters and the film crew and found out that the lady was a proverbial Leni Riefenstahl or Michael Moore of BBC trash "journalism", who had made a career out of distorting any and all facts to fit her ideological agenda, fully supported (no surprises there) by BBC high brass.

NEVER trust BBC. Not at all. Even the slightest bit. They're the equivalent of a self-righteous truth commission that will screw anybody over and distort the reality to their liking, not unlike the majority of other mainstream media. Stern? Well, do a meticulous background check of the reporter before you agree to anything.

Hint: there's a major push for an extremely draconian EU Firearms Directive, spearheaded by the Fourth Reich-esque government of Germany, and I wouldn't be totally surprised if the German printed media has an agenda to support their current Führerin and her Merkeljugend in this endeavor. I sincerely hope that's not what the OP's request is all about.

There you go (I don't speak German, sorry)... https://www.google.bg/search?q=Frie...kN_YAhUPzqQKHe8BC8wQ_AUIDCgD&biw=1680&bih=928

Thank You Coswabbit


Seems we can now know which way his article will likely be slanted. Anti-Trump magazine cover and other info you provided should warn all that our new German acquaintance is looking to trash our USA gun owners. I will not help him.

mnrivrat said:

Seems we can now know which way his article will likely be slanted. Anti-Trump magazine cover and other info you provided should warn all that our new German acquaintance is looking to trash our USA gun owners. I will not help him.

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It might be appropriate to get the word out to as wide audience of shooters, hunters and gun enthusiasts as possible. Otherwise there's a good chance someone will fall for it. Doing favors to anti-gun media never pays off, the result is the polar opposite of facts and objectivity without a fail.

mnrivrat said:

Thank You Coswabbit


Seems we can now know which way his article will likely be slanted. Anti-Trump magazine cover and other info you provided should warn all that our new German acquaintance is looking to trash our USA gun owners. I will not help him.

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Gee, a "journalist" who is lying in order to write a story... Who'd a thunk it ?
Good thinking on checking this guy out.

Guys, an European not liking Trump is not uncommon, but for different reasons that are unrelated to RKBA. Just google Friedemann's articles, he's got a public Facebook page by the way, to form an informed opinion about that guy before you judge. Not everything is black & white you know...

Heck, there are even Americans who like guns and gun rights but who don't think Mr. Trump is acquitting himself very well as president!

If we give up interacting with anyone who is currently not a pro-gun person, how in the world do we expect to ever make headway or win converts?

No doubt some grotesque abuses of journalistic standards have occurred in the name of "fighting gun violence," but those tend to be exposed. On balance, did the Katie Couric nonsense do more to make people anti-gun, or did it do more to call into question the reasonableness and objectivity of Ms. Couric?

the blind acceptance of assisting and ramifications of same was graciously told by hq!

the mod is correct, nothing connects the foreign national journalist to the april 17 cover, but if editorially the distinguished German mag is anti- then the journalists, to get published, follow that editorial lead.

personally i have hesitation to publicly putting myself where things could, due to murphy, go south quickly resulting in explaining both judicially or to friends.

as stated, americans, for the most part are exposed, from an early age, to firearms, either hunting, competition, etc. European citizens are not!

let them acquaint themselves to a commerical entity to fulfill then need to experience ‘the fasination’

coswabbit said:

European citizens are not

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You haven't heard of IWA fair in Nuremberg, right? Because I've been there - this is THE biggest annual "Shot Show" in Europe... Trust me, it's huge! Have you entered some of Frankonia's gun shops, or at least some small German gun-shop to see what they offer? Hekler & Koch, Sauer & Sohn, Mauser, Walther, Heim, Voere, Feinwerkbau, Weihrauch, Krieghoff, Anschutz, just to put a few names of German companies. Contrary to the popular believe, Germans get along with firearms quite well actually.

check out shotshow.org and see if you can get a media pass, or something. it is in las vegas and will cover everything you could possibly want to know about shooting.

luck,

murf

I live in Las Vegas and had many thoughts to help this journalist, but have decided against it. Fishy and I don't like how these things are usually twisted left.

My president is Donald Trump . I am sick and tired of people disrespecting him and the office he holds by continuing to pick at him day after day with every BS thing they can imagine. A media that continues to insult the president of the United States whether here or abroad has no credibility with me whatsoever. I would not trust such a publication to produce articles that are unbiased about anything let alone the subject of America's gun owners.

If Germans get along well with guns then why can't the OP learn to shoot there ?

Trust him if you like, but I personally do not want to look like a fool when his article is published in the magazine he is representing.

PS: And why Vegas ? Could it have something to do with the past shooting there ? It would have been a lot shorter trip to go to the east coast.

Mizar said:

You haven't heard of IWA fair in Nuremberg, right? Because I've been there - this is THE biggest annual "Shot Show" in Europe... Trust me, it's huge! Have you entered some of Frankonia's gun shops, or at least some small German gun-shop to see what they offer? Hekler & Koch, Sauer & Sohn, Mauser, Walther, Heim, Voere, Feinwerkbau, Weihrauch, Krieghoff, Anschutz, just to put a few names of German companies. Contrary to the popular believe, Germans get along with firearms quite well actually.

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as NSSF's Shot Show which is about to commence whose admittance to the show is extremely limited to those industry exhibitors & retailers. IWA's attendance is similarly limited.

my comment regarding Europeans, they like to hunt, competitively shoot, but carrying personal handguns for self defence is severely limited!

Really, a non-issue. Non-immigrant visitor on a visa cannot possess firearm or ammunition. Transfer to same is also illegal. 18 USC 922 is long and boring, but covers this.

There are anecdotes of foreign visitors being allowed to rent and shoot firearms, but those are hearsay. There are anecdotes that people produce more than 1 gallon of distilled spirits for profit, too. Which would not make those activities legal.

Mizar said:

You haven't heard of IWA fair in Nuremberg, right? Because I've been there - this is THE biggest annual "Shot Show" in Europe... Trust me, it's huge! Have you entered some of Frankonia's gun shops, or at least some small German gun-shop to see what they offer? Hekler & Koch, Sauer & Sohn, Mauser, Walther, Heim, Voere, Feinwerkbau, Weihrauch, Krieghoff, Anschutz, just to put a few names of German companies. Contrary to the popular believe, Germans get along with firearms quite well actually.

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That's putting it mildly. I've shot in Germany - the range in Pforzheim puts anything short of the new CMP facility in Talladega to shame. And I'd rather go to IWA Nuremberg than SHOT - there's more variety there.

friedemannkarig said:

Thanks! Would you just google "private gun club nevada"? (Sorry, might be a stupid question, but you´re the expert)

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Attached is a list I found. Yes, you can do a search under Las Vegas private gun clubs and you'll see quite a few.

https://www.shooting.org/Ranges/Nevada/Las_Vegas/pacificarcherysales.co...

There are anecdotes of foreign visitors being allowed to rent and shoot firearms, but those are hearsay

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The places in Vegas rent to everyone and their biggest customers come from countries where guns are very restrictive. The full-auto stuff seems to be the most popular, followed by your basic semi handguns.

George P said:

The places in Vegas rent to everyone and their biggest customers come from countries where guns are very restrictive. The dull-auto stuff seems to be the most popular, followed by your basic semi handguns.

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"Dull auto?" Who would have thought machine guns were .... "dull?"

Tommygunn said:

"Dull auto?" Who would have thought machine guns were .... "dull?"

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Thanks for the catch.....been using this laptop so long, some of the letters have worn off the keys!!!

friedemannkarig said:

I am not sure, btw, what Trump has do to with all of this, since no president before him made any major changes (from the German point of view) to gun laws.

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From the American perspective, several prior presidents have made major changes to gun laws, and others (including the last president) have proposed major changes that were narrowly defeated in Congress. Remember that the American baseline for what is "normal" regarding gun laws is what Americans have grown up with - not what Germans have grown accustomed to.

Good luck with the story, and watch out for confirmation bias! If you don't learn something surprising, you probably weren't paying attention...

friedemannkarig said:

since no president before him made any major changes (from the German point of view) to gun laws.

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Not quite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States

Start with the "Firearm legal topics of the United States of America" -box on the right hand side, read the links through starting with National Firearms Act of 1934 and Federal Firearms Act of 1938, and work your way through all the way to present day. It's safe to say everything has changed substantially over the years, even recently.

For an easier read, https://www.thoughtco.com/us-gun-control-timeline-3963620 carries somewhat "interesting" editorial narrative throughout, missing (intentionally?) VERY major legislative changes like the prohibition of registration of new machine guns with The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 and visibly complaining about failed attempts at implementing even draconian legislative measures, but contains some usable links to legislative documents. Even that is just the tip of the iceberg.

friedemannkarig said:

So, thanks again for your thoughts. I found some people who are willing to meet me without any prejudices, which is my ambition as well.

I am not sure, btw, what Trump has do to with all of this, since no president before him made any major changes (from the German point of view) to gun laws.
And, just for the record: journalism doesn´t work like a factory, where your boss tells you what to do and you follow or otherwise you are fired. It really just does not. Believe it or not: I NEVER, in ten years of doing print and online and TV and radio, received anything like an "editorial order". It just wouldn´t make sense.

I sincerely appreciate anybody´s help here. I hope you will like the result, when it´s published.

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the new American movie THE POST is about the first female publisher of a major American newspaper -- The Washington Post. With help from editor Graham races to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spans three decades and four U.S. presidents. Together, they must overcome their differences as they risk their careers -- and very freedom -- to help bring long-buried truths to light.

you are right, journalism doesn't work like a normal factory and just doesn't make sense - does it?