AMEN Brother Jim!

This from this morning's Outdoor Wire, the daily business update from Jim Shepherd:

The National Sporting Goods Association has released their Sports Participation Survey for 2004. While we hear the continued cry of diminishing participation in the outdoors, their statistics seem to contradict that position - if you remove hunting and fishing, the numbers actually look positive.

Hunting, fishing and power boating, long drivers of the "outdoor" economy's big participation numbers, all experienced declines in NSGA's 2004 numbers (1.1, 3.6 and 5.9 percent, respectively).

There were other areas where the news was better.
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And even with a drop in firearms - hunting firearms, that is - there are three areas of growth inside the shooting category. They might indicate a need for the shooting "industry" to look more outside the hunting category to reach -and recruit - shooters.

The now-familiar mantra "we must increase hunting in order to grow the firearms industry" doesn't seem to be borne out when you see double-digit growth in muzzleloading (12.1%), target shooting (7%) and paintball (28%). In fact, their growth just might contra-indicate the wisdom of centering a majority of the firearms industry's recruitment and retention efforts on hunting.

If you accept the NASG numbers, they would indicate that people are more than willing to give shooting sports a try, they're just not trying areas where industry leadership is accustomed to looking.

That might not be a popular position, but it's hard to argue with the numbers.

Further, using the NASG's numbers, there are one-point-five million (1,500,000) more people target shooting than hunting. There's quite likely some double-counting across these segments, but it would seem to indicate a need for more outreach to the blackpowder and target shooting groups. From a purely business perspective, target shooting - whether with muzzleloader or traditional firearm - would seem to represent a market for sales of significantly more ammunition, cleaning supplies and other "pure shooting" accessories than hunting.

Our own numbers prove that the shooting sports numbers are growing while hunting is flat or declining. Yet NSSF, our industry trade group, continues to focus EXCLUSIVELY on hunting as a way of growing the sport. I am starting to hear grumbling from VERY highly placed honchos within the industry over NSSF's continued obsession with hunting — even some insiders who are themselves very active hunters and proponents of hunting! It's probably not going to help matters that NSSF's latest initiative, presently in production, is a 30-minute "infomercial" on using preserves to introduce kids to bird hunting.

I feel — and I've conveyed this to NSSF — that high-fence "hunting" is a very slippery slope. Right now, we have the public more-or-less with us on hunting as part of our American heritage and, IMO, a slight trend in the positive direction. But when people think of hunting, they think of fair chase hunting — Bambi has a chance to get away, and we have a chance to get skunked. If we shift a portion of the emphasis to preserves — that is, a fenced or otherwise contained area where animals are bred, fed and "managed" exclusively for hunting — that has implications for those already flat/declining numbers, because the public isn't going to stay with us. I've shot on preserves and filmed on preserves; I'm not anti-preserve hunting! But IMO it is the ABSOLUTE WRONG DIRECTION for us as an industry to be headed in!!!