So it is with amusement and of course a sense of alarm that I see a couple of righteous organisation trying to shock the world in announcing that kids under 10 have been issued with shotgun licenses.
BBC.
The fact that they've applied for licenses means that somewhere along the lines there are adults involved, it means they will be using the guns responsibly and will probably be trained in the safe use of said weapons. It's not like they are going to their mates and getting hold of weapons under the counter now is it?Thirteen children under the age of 10 have been issued with shotgun certificates in the UK over the past three years.The youngest child to be granted a licence was seven years old, figures obtained by BBC News show.Last year, the Association of Chief Police Officers suggested that Under 10s are banned from using shotguns.
I'm not sure why ACPO are involved in this, other than they're possibly afraid that an armed society might put them out of a job, I can't find any case of a 10 year old in an armed robbery with a shotgun, they seem to be remarkably well behaved in that sense. So it just seems that ACPO want them banned for the sake of being banned in the same way that pistols etc have been banned, it's a knee jerk reaction from righteous organisations fearful that the people they oppress might just turn around and bite them, so remove the weapons, but not the cause. Thing is, all they've done is left us with the situation where only the police/armed forces and criminals have fire arms, that and the odd few who are criminalised because they have their granddads WW2 pistol tucked away as an antique.
Still they are reviewing the laws again, so I fully expect another group of law abiding people will be victimised by the state for enjoying their sport and have their equipment banned or removed from use. It's what the state does these days when it isn't taxing us to the hilt and making our lives a misery, it removes the tools necessary to remove them by force.
Their day will come of course, though I doubt I'll use my shotgun, I'd much prefer to hang them and watch them struggle.
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From the age of about ten, I was made to learn a piece of doggerel which began
"Never, never let your gun
Pointed be at anyone.
That it may unloaded be
Matters not the least to me..."
When I got a bit bigger, I was allowed to take a .410 out with the grown-ups rough shooting but it was kept unloaded until I was seen to have kept to all the instructions in the poem which included such things as
"If twixt you and neighbouring gun,
Bird may fly or beast may run,
Let this maxim e'er be thine -
Follow not across the line..."
I can't remember all of it in sequence now. It was nearly sixty years ago but I think it ended
"All the pheasants ever bred
Won't atone for one man dead".
I am sure that anybody brought up like this is very unlikely to be a danger to anyone. It should be encouraged!
PS I took the political compass test and came out with a reading of slightly right and slightly authoritarian..
QM, most definitely it must be a jig at the end of a rope! Much more enjoyment!
Never mind the shotgun thing what about the continuing dribble of 'stories' about the alleged misuse of airguns over the past few weeks?
I feel a ban coming on, something must be done.
Well said, Quiet Man!
@Edward Spalton - your people must be better educated than mine; I was brought up on
'...All the pheasants ever got
Will not make up for one friend shot.'
but the idea's the same; early training makes for responsible behaviour.
What's the betting that, should ACPO succeed, the statistics will make no distinction between a sawn-off wrested from a Peckham gang-member and a family hand-me-down plucked from the hands of a well-supervised farmer's child?
"We are successfully combatting youth crime and have removed x weapons from under 14s this year."
I'm with you on the rope jig.#
I'm also all for young people learning about gun responsibility at an early age.
I have a plan to keep my shotguns should a ban come in ;-)
It would be much too difficult to ban stotguns outright at the moment. Particularly when all the lords and royalty use them, although they would probably get an exemption.
This is a way of chewing at the edges of the law and slowly denormalising shotguns until the day when they can be safely banned without much of an arguement.
William is right about the airguns too. Won't be long.
They don't want an armed population. They demonise weapons whilst arming their political police to the teeth.
It will be bows and arrows, catapults, spearguns and knives over one inch long next, then it will be fireworks and martial arts clubs will be restricted to facial grimmaces to frighten an attacker.
"It would be much too difficult to ban stotguns outright at the moment."
They usually apply the incremental approach. There is always a rent-a-quote labourite or rozzer and an on-message media to broadcast their anti-gun piffle. If they can ban it for under-10s, they will not of course stop. They can move that up to under-18s, they can start making the licencing process more difficult and more expensive etc
The day they ban shotguns is the day my house get burgled and the robber miraculously manages to rip my gunsafe off the wall and nick all my ammo.
I will of course be heartbroken.
I grew up in Central Africa in the late 50s - early 60s. When I was 10 I traded my air rifle for a 'proper' .22. The only training I received was the comment,"Be careful. This can kill."
When I was 14 and starting to go off into the bush for weekends with my friends, my Father gave me a .375 Winchester because, he said, all that the .22 would to to any large beast which came my way would be to make it very angry! My friends all had similar firearms, 30-06s, 308s etc. None of us had ever been formally trained in firearm safety, it just WAS. It was simply how things were done.
No rifle had the bolt inserted until a hunt was commenced, magazines were loaded but only the lead walker had a round chambered, everyone had their safety catch ON, and this we all checked frequently.
When shooting, there was a nominated shot, he had a back-up who had a round chambered but with safety ON. Once the shot had been taken the shooter worked the bolt to put another round into the chamber and safed his rifle and showed his backup that he'd done this. The shooter and his backup then went to recover the shot beast, usually an impala. The rest of us, normally three or four persons, kept a wary eye out for a predator chancing it for an easy meal.
In 10 years of hunting regularly like this we never once had any sort of 'accident' with a firearm while we kept a healthy supply of venison on the various family tables.
We grew up with firearms, we respected firearms and we demanded SAFETY with firearms from everyone with whom we went hunting. That was simply part-and-parcel of how we lived.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a 10-year old being given a shotgun if he or she has grown up in a culture where guns are respected.
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