The Bisley Team.

Manawatu Herald, 16 April 1903, Page 2

The Bisley Team.

There is good reason to believe that the proposal to send a New Zealand team to Bisley this year will not be carried out Writing on the subject, lihe Christchurch Press says:—“lf the Government really want to encourage good shooting they might spend the money in providing good rang®s in the colony,

The Auckland range is described as a disgrace to the Defence Defence Department, and there are other centres where the volunteers are greatly handicapped. Increased assistance to the Trentham meeting to be devoted to the matches under service conditions would also do more to increase the efficiency of the volunteers than would the annual despatch of a Bisley team for a generation. We are training now, as we have done for fifty years, a race of ‘range marksmen’—men who can do wonders with a rifle if they have at command a whole list of accessories. What we want is for eur riflemen to depend less on wind gauges and flags, and more on their brains and eyes, and their unaided skill with the rifle. The Cora-mander-in-Chiefg match, the Colonial Ammunition Company’s Cup, and the teams’ match, as conducted ; at Trentham, approach more nearly to the conditions of active service than any others Instead of these matches being left to the last day of j the meeting we would have them and others like them made the most prominent events of the week. We would have them count for the belts and the champion rifle shot of New Zealand should be the man whose j fire would be the most deadly in j >var, not as now, the most accurate j shot under conditions that have never occurred in war since gun- i powder was invented.”