What Gelsoft Means to me

I started gel blasting about 3 years ago. My best friend introduced it to me one day when he brought his blaster a M4 Gen8. That week I looked online to see what was there and brought My first blaster an M4SS a few weeks later.

When we had enough gear we went to our first game and was that an experience. The mental and physical strain on me was enormous. You had to squat, crawl and run, while looking around to see what is happening on the whole field. I was sore the next 2 weeks, but as the more I played the easier it became.

For me I am not very outgoing, you could have counted the number of friend on less than one hand, but gel blasting made it easier for me to meet new people and have more of a social life. When we are at the games we all have something in common and it made it easy to talk with people and expand friendships between other group members. Even my wife had noticed a difference in me and my social life.

I enjoyed going to the games as it let me have an “outlet” from the day to day things of that week.
Some weeks my job can be very stressful and I need to “let go” of that and gel blasting gave me that, a way to just go out and do some of the things I did as a child, playing soldiers with my friends. It also gave me something to do at home with repairs and “tinkering” with them to get the best performance out of the blaster.

I enjoy all the aspects of the sport it keeps me mentally and physically challenged and I was meeting new people all the time and helping them out, that is another part of the sport, everyone is willing to help anyone when needed. I have helped out multiple people at the games from what blaster they should look at buying, repairs and even lending out my personal blasters, batteries or other items if they were having problems with theirs so they could stay longer.

I was starting to get my daughter into gel blasting as she has Down Syndrome. For her she has sensory issues and we were working on that at home, like holding and using the blaster safely & correctly, firing the blaster so she could get use to the sound that it makes and the feel of the gels from them in your hands to when they hit you and they don’t hurt. She though it was really funny shooting me in the butt or just shooting me altogether.

Now that is all gone due to the decision the WA Government has made with little to no consultation to the community. At the moment I am feel angry and lost mentally, I don’t know what I will do now as I feel lost. It was the easy option for the WA Government to ban gel blasters than it was to consult the community and now they are ignoring our calls for consultation.

This is some of what gel blasting means to me and I hope we can get it back in some form in the future.