correcting the tele

[little arrows]

We were just watching a show whilst having dinner when a man was shot with a rather substantial diameter crossbow bolt. We both said something along the lines of ....must be a might powerful crossbow to have a bolt that diameter... as Steve is currently working to completed a set of shafts for a 150# longbow, and also make the 1/2" diameter steel points to go onto said 1/2" shafts, it was a rather poignant current subject, in this house anyway.
To then find said perpetrator hand loading what appeared to be a low poundage crossbow by hand (yes I now poetic licence), anyhoo as the Police Officer was attending the crime scene he kept saying arrow, and we both kept looking at the television, and in a corrective tone found ourselves saying - BOLT. When this happened the 3rd time we both looked at each other and laughed, they just weren't listening.
Does anyone else do this?

cheers
sue

[Gringa Bows]

of coarse not Sue.

[Mick Smith]

Yeah Sue, I do it all the time, much to my wife's annoyance.

It's very prevalent with firearms in particular. I'm an old rifle shooter from a way back. Do you remember the 'Rifleman' series on TV, starring Chuck Connors? It always annoyed me in the opening credits when he managed to shoot his model 92 Winchester 11 times in rapid succession. They only hold 10 rounds, including one in the chamber!

What about the never diminishing number of arrows in the quiver, in just about all the newer movies. It seems they can shoot arrow after arrow, yet in the next scene they're all still there again. It's magic. I think I need a quiver like that at most trad shoots.

[alaninoz]

No never - we don't have a television. I do argue with the radio, and sometime even with the newspapers.

[rodlonq]

You should hear me telling the NQ Cowboys to use the back line.... ruck, ruck, ruck is all they want to do... They hardly ever take any notice of me, but occasionally I shout load enough to be heard.... LOL

Cheers.... Rod

[Dennis La Varenne]

Crossbow bolts are still arrows in the same way that a wallaby is part of the Macropod family, some of which are much taller and have a different name. They are still Macropodidae. Arbalesters are archers the same as us. The shoot short arrows called bolts from short bows bows called prods fixed horizontally to a tiller so that they can be spanned more easily back to full draw. They have the benefit of being able to be shot from the prone position and the disadvantage of being slower to draw. They are no more nor less safe to shoot than a conventional vertically held bow. When spanned, the bolt is not placed until the shot is about to be taken any more than a compound shooter would walk around with the bow at full draw and armed with an arrow.

The bolt is no more nor less than an arrow having all the same characteristics of any arrow which enables good flight. The are merely shorter arrows adapted to the short power stroke of the crossbow, but generally having double the mass and double the draw weight in order to propel them at equivalent distances with similar power to a conventional bow of approximately half the draw weight and arrow mass.

Like any bow, they can be misused, but can be learned to shoot a lot more easily because of the way in which the crossbow and its mechanism of discharge have been copied and adapted into firearms over the centuries. Cross bows have tillers, whilst longarms have stocks, but both serve the same function. The word stock is German in origin and means a stick or length of wood usually in rod form. The tiller of the crossbow has an entirely different aetiology from archery's past. The 'tickler' of the crossbow later became the 'tricker' and later the 'trigger' of the firearm. The barrel of the firearm got its name from the original method of making them which was exactly the way in which Coopers made barrels. The name stuck.

Crossbows were certainly in use at least back into Roman times, both hand held and as ballistas and long before the Anglo-Saxons of England moved in favour of the very ancient northern European mostly ovoid section long bow which was cheap and fast to make for peasant use and long before its adoption by English armies as artillery.

I do not think that we have any moral right to superiority of attitude over our crossbow brethren. Our traditions come from the same peoples from the same period. Crossbowmen ought to be equal members of our archery clubs shooting alongside us at comps and following the same safety procedures where we can take them from the streets of ignorance and teach them the proper use of the crossbow instead of trying to disown them as the 'dark' side of archery.

[little arrows]

well, that's me told!

[Dennis La Varenne]

Sue,

My post wasn't meant to be personal toward you. Please don't take it that way. I am putting up ideas to address an obvious problem which I derived from your comment about correcting the use of archery terminology in the media. I do understand where you are coming from and you are far from alone. My point is to question why we, as mainstream archers, are so touchy about it.

Many of us cringe when somebody misuses a crossbow and we duck for cover usually telling authorities that 'they' aren't 'us' and we don't support them. Indeed, there is or was a section in the ABA constitution specifically saying that the organization did not recognise the crossbow (as a part of archery) which I always considered to have been a serious error of judgement on ABA's part. Crossbow shooting is as old as any other traditional form or archery practised today and clearly there was no separation between the two forms in the heyday of their respective historical periods, save that the crossbow was more expensive to make.

People are interested in crossbows in the same way that people are interested in compound bows or longbows or any other kind of bow. There are no more insurmountable safety issues with the use of the crossbow on archery ranges than with any other variety of bow. A crossbow should not be spanned until the shot is to be taken and the crossbow not armed until then either. Because of possible excessive damage to butts from bolts which are often very heavy and have a big cross-section, it may be reasonable to limit the power range, but that would need verifying and establishing.

If we as archers catered for these arbalesters and taught them correct usage and safety, as well as providing places where they could practise in safety and supervision, we may be surprised to find that the incidence of misuse declines to unnoticeable - no small thing for archery in general because that misuse is almost the only kind of archery vandalism and is also the only kind of archery which is ignored by the archery mainstream.

To me, there are parallel lines of between the two forms of archery where the one is catered for and has an insignificantly low incidence of public misuse and the other where there is a small but well publicised incidence of misuse which is almost completely ignored/disdained by mainstream archery and I cannot but help thinking that there is a causal relationship between acceptance and training on the one hand and the lack of it for the other.

Whether we like it or not, we do have a problem which does reflect on us no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from it. The ordinary public does NOT see a difference between crossbow shooters and us no matter how much we try to make that separation. A modern compound bow can be held armed and at full draw for extended periods and loosed using a trigger mechanism in the same way that a cross bow is spanned and armed and discharged using the tickler bar. The difference is that one bow is vertical and the other horizontal.

Do others have any views on the issue?

[Mett]

Crossbow bolts are still arrows in the same way that a wallaby is part of the Macropod family

I get what you're saying but to me that's like seeing a wallaby and calling it a kangaroo. Even though both are from the same family, they are at the same time different. I do agree with you about the fact that traditional archery is from the same family as crossbows since without the common bow we may not have crossbows.

Nice to meet everyone by the way.

~Matt

[Mick Smith]

Welcome Matt!

[Dennis La Varenne]

Yes, welcome, Matt.

Be careful with that analogy though, because you can reverse it just as easily.

The only difference I can see and feel with my eyes closed is that the crossbow bolt does not have a string nock (because it does not need one) and that it is shorter. But the 'arrows' of New Guineans and the Melan- and Micronesian islands do not have string nocks either for the most part, nor do they have flights, so what are they???

Other than arguing about the minutiae of projectiles, the more important point is the principle of somebody/organization taking responsibility to try to change a pattern of behaviour by a very small but significant number of people whose activities reflect badly on the mainstream when they do misbehave.

Most of 'us' go into denial mode and try pointlessly and completely ineffectually to 'educate' the general public in those same unimportant minutiae of projectile shape. They are not fooled by that approach and scoff at our attempts to distance those perpetrators from ourselves.

They may be the black sheep of our family, but they are still our family and it is up to us to try to sort them out.

[Mett]

It truly does suck that we are compared to our crossbow user family. Little story involved in this one. I was bow fishing once (all legally) before receiving a visit from my local police. Apparently someone has called the police saying that I had a crossbow. I didn't mind since he was just doing his job until the officer called the station asking if use of a crossbow unlicensed was legal, I had to explain to him the difference between a crossbow and a recurve bow.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Mett,

Up your way, crossbows are covered by your Weapons Act as a class M weapon requiring some kind of licensing. It is similar here in NSW, but Victoria has dropped their laws saying that a crossbow does not need any kind of license so long as it is sold to a person who can produce a current membership card of an archery club/organization or other shooting /hunting organization. The problems with misuse of crossbows in Victoria was neither worse nor better than anywhere else, but in my reading of the legislative changes, they recognised the problem of crossbow shooters being orphaned so far as membership of organizations was concerned, where they could not get, but should have been able to get proper training and taught proper safety protocols.

At least with this approach, there is a much greater chance of them reducing such incidents of misuse than without. Nothing good ever comes from marginalising any section of society. It would perhaps be a good thing if they could form their own organization, but unfortunately, the people who are presently using them legally are so few in number that they have had to resort to umbrella under the aegis of current organizations (Archery Australia) to afford the insurance costs.

Never-the-less, my own view is that with so few actually shooting crossbows, both legally and illegally, that the number of incidents of misuse is very very low and it should not be too much to ask of the archery organizations to open their gates to this particular branch of archery and help reduce those few incidents to zero. There is nothing intrinsically bad about crossbows. People do use them for miscreant purposes and it is the people who need retraining to a socially acceptable form of behaviour with their use.

So long as we in mainstream archery marginalise crossbows and their users, the problem will persist and we will be blamed. The general public is not interested in differentiating the two and we would be wasting enormous effort in trying to do so when the lesser effort could easily come from within by including them and teaching them.

[Roadie]

I was quite surprised by comments made to me by people who thought a Cross Bow and a Compound Bow was the same thing. I soon explained what the difference was between them, then Trying to explain to people that I was a Trad Archer, Most people have no idea about our love of our Sport. Cheers Roadie.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Here in NSW, there have been attempts by the Greens to have compound bows either registered or banned because of their power or some other such silly rot. Nothing has come of it so far, but I would never underestimate the beggars' determination about that prospect.

[cb175]

Now to throw another person into the mix. I am one of those odd bods who shoots crossbow & trad. I shoot an Excalibur crossbow on a FITA Field course at Strathalbyn (in S.A.) and thoroughly enjoy it. My scores are reasonable, if not great. If you do it right it works with groups like the one below at 55m (life size rabbit stencil). Like all archery there are lots of opportunities to get it wrong and the groups widen very quickly!

I also shoot at a trad club with an Omega Delta longbow, which I have recently acquired, and am still very much on a learning curve. I enjoy that immensely, too.

I see no reason the two can't co-exist.

(I also have one of Sue's beautiful bow bags for the longbow.....)

To pick up Sue's original point, I watched the first episode of "World Without End" on the ABC last Sunday night. This is set in 14th century England at the time of Edward III. Very early in the show a knight is being chased on horseback by two others. They are shooting at him with crossbows. Not once, but several times - at full gallop. Would be very interesting to see someone brace (cock) a crossbow even sitting still on a horse! The liberty taken in making adventure appear on our screens!

Anyway, it is all archery and let's all enjoy it in a safe and legal manner.