What Magnum Sports stands for, and why one shop can back both the fox shooter and the club champion.

Walk into the shop on a Saturday and you'll meet two kinds of customer. One has a mate with a property out past Mudgee who has asked for help with the foxes, and wants a rifle that will do the job cleanly at 150 metres. The other has a club match next weekend and wants to know why their groups open up after the third string. They rarely talk to each other. They should, because they are doing the same thing: taking the shot seriously.

That is what our new line means. Protect native wildlife. Perfect your shot. One half is about why a lot of our customers shoot. The other is about how all of them should.

The bush has a feral problem, and it's a big one

Australia has the worst mammal extinction record in the world, and introduced predators are the main reason. A 2022 study led by Charles Darwin University put a number on it: cats and foxes between them kill around 2.6 billion mammals, birds and reptiles in Australia every year. Foxes alone account for roughly 300 million native animals, and their densities are highest right here in temperate south-eastern Australia, including the Blue Mountains. Cats and foxes have played a major role in most of the 34 Australian mammal species lost since European settlement.

Foxes and cats get the headlines, but they have company. Feral pigs dig up wetlands and eat turtle and ground-nesting bird eggs. Goats strip the hillsides that rock-wallabies depend on. Deer trample creek banks and rub the bark off saplings. Rabbits out-compete native grazers and start the erosion that finishes the job.

Baiting, trapping and exclusion fencing all have their place. So does a competent shooter with a suitable rifle who knows the property and turns up year after year. Landholders across NSW rely on licensed hunters and professional pest controllers for exactly that, and nobody who has walked a paddock the morning after a fox went through the lambing mob needs the argument made twice.

We are not going to pretend a weekend on a property fixes the fox problem on its own. It doesn't. Integrated control does, and shooting is one leg of it. But every fox, cat or pig taken off a property is one that isn't working through the local bandicoots, small birds and lizards that night. That is protection of native wildlife in the most literal sense, and the people who do it are entitled to say so.

The gear is a welfare issue, not a luxury

There is a reason we don't sell 'a rifle for foxes' off the shelf without asking questions. A clean kill comes down to a calibre suited to the animal, a projectile that does what it is meant to at the range you are shooting, a scope that is properly zeroed, and a shooter who has put rounds in at the range beforehand. Get any one of those wrong and the outcome is a wounded animal and a wasted trip.

So when you ask us about a setup, expect questions back. What are you shooting, at what range, in what country, day or night? We would rather sell you the right rifle once than the wrong one and a second one to fix it.

The other half of the shop

Target shooting is an Olympic and Commonwealth Games sport, and Australia is good at it. Around Sydney and across the state you will find clubs running everything from ISSF and service rifle to benchrest, precision long range, silhouette, IPSC and clay target. The gear could not be more varied. A Fullbore rifle, a rimfire benchrest rig and a practical pistol have nothing in common except that the person behind them needs to be consistent.

Consistency is the whole game, and it happens to be the same thing the fox shooter needs. Know your equipment. Know your load. Know what your rifle does at 300 metres in a crosswind because you have measured it, not because the box says so.

We stock for competitors properly: match-grade ammunition, reloading components, optics, rests, slings and the small parts that decide a match. If you are thinking about competing and don't know where to start, come in. We will tell you which discipline suits what you already own and point you at a club. The shooting community in NSW is smaller and friendlier than people expect.

One shop, one standard

Licensed. Trained. Accurate. Accountable. Whether the target is a scoring ring at 300 metres or a fox at 150 at last light, the standard is the same and the skills transfer both ways. Plenty of good pest controllers started on a club range, and plenty of competitors got their first rifle for the family farm.

That is why one shop can stand for both without contradiction. Protect native wildlife. Perfect your shot. Neither one is a line you can live up to with the wrong gear or a half-hearted approach, and we don't think you would want to.

Magnum Sports · 19 Babbage Road, Roseville Chase NSW 2069 · (02) 9882 2689 · sales@magnumsports.com.au
NSW Firearms Dealer Licence No. 413159984

Predator figures: Stobo-Wilson et al. 2022, Diversity and Distributions, summarised by Charles Darwin University.