Fish'n'Hunt members vented their anger on the website yesterday, saying that "people are so stupid that they would spotlight a public camp ground at a road end on Labour Weekend".
The forum's administrator, Allan Simmons, said the man responsible and the group he was with were a bunch of "spotlighting yahoos" and "not hunters".
He said the area was well known to forum members, some of whom had been spotlighted during a get-together at the same place.
Mr Simmons' claims were echoed by the Department of Conservation's Taupo Turangi area manager, Dave Lumley, who said spotlighting was a problem in the region.
Mr Simmons condemned spotlighting as "illegal and dangerous and not hunting".
"Hunters are extremely safety conscious and appalled when events such as this are flung into the media and the word 'hunter' is used to label these people, leaving the tens of thousands of genuine hunters to deal with public anger and the repercussions."
Mr Simmons said the people involved had broken the law by allegedly shooting from a public road after dark on Department of Conservation land
"Hunters are as spooked out by it as anyone else when their tent is lit by a spotlight late at night and wish to see an end to this insidious and lazy way of looking for something to shoot at," he said.
The Dominion Post reported this morning that National MP Louise Upston helped to give compressions to Ms Ives after police she was accompanying were called to the scene.
The MP for Taupo had been with police in Turangi on Friday night to see first hand the harm caused by alcohol.
Mrs Upston arrived with police and found Mr Hyndman giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while a female camper did chest compressions.
Mrs Upston took over the compressions so the other woman could rest, sharing the work until paramedics arrived about 40 minutes later.
"You don't think, 'Will I or won't I?', you just get in there and do what needs to be done," she said.
"You become desperate, basically. All of us wanted to do our absolute best to pull [Ms Ives] through. Unfortunately, her injuries were substantial and what we did do was probably never going to be enough."
Meanwhile, Miss Ives' pupils will be offered trauma counselling on their return to school today.
Wa Ora Montessori School principal Jan Gaffney told One News that dealing with the shock would be a slow process.
- With NZPA
