THE owner of a Riverland gel blaster field says he has lost thousands of dollars’ worth of forward bookings due to a new ban by South Australian Police.
Chris Mapley, who runs the Winkie-based Riverland Mobile Skirmish Field, said he cancelled more than $10,000 in bookings last Wednesday after SAPOL announced that gel blasters would be declared imitation firearms, with owners required to obtain gun licences and registrations.
“I’ve put a lot of money into this field and getting this business going,” Mr Mapley said.
“The business has been running for 12 months and then COVID came and kicked me in the guts, and just as we started recovering this happened.
“I had about 100 people booked in for this past weekend, which is about $4000 worth of business for our local economy, and at the end of the month I had about another 200 to 300 people booked.
“It’s going to cost me about another $3000 to get all this other stuff done, and it’s not going to happen immediately.”
Mr Mapley said while he was supportive of some level of restrictions on gel blasters, he felt SAPOL should have taken a gentler route.
“I’m all for the fact that they need to be classified as a firearm of sorts, because if someone uses them in the wrong way they need to be prosecuted as though they’ve used a firearm… but they could’ve gone a gentler route and said they are a replica-type firearm” he said.
“That way they would be classified as a firearm but you wouldn’t need to have a licence and you wouldn’t need to register it.
“It’s just taken two or three idiots to stuff it up for everyone.
“I don’t want to give this up because it’s a great tourism business for the Riverland.
“I’m already applying for my firearms licence but it’s going to cost me a lot more money to get everything to their specifications and I hope that is not enough to turn people away from doing it.
“Luckily, I’ve had people reach out to me and help me work out what to do, but there’s been a lot of stuff just dropped on the industry all at once.”