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UK:A possible ban on air-guns has country-folk on
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
A possible ban on air-guns has country-folk on the defensive. Sandy Mitchell reports
When you next see a young boy playing with a water pistol, be prepared to see armed police yelling at him through a loudhailer before spread-eagling the child and frisking him for conkers or catapults.
That day cannot be far off. A group of Labour MPs has started a campaign in Parliament to ban air-guns - only one step up from water pistols. As anyone reared in the country knows, an air rifle is the best present you can give a child of the right age. Nothing in life, not even fatherhood, has made me feel more grown-up and responsible than being presented with my Webley .177 as a child of 10.
My father's sternest commandment was that I must never fire at a living creature. He taught me to revere the safety rules so that I was never tempted to challenge his holy writ - except once. That day I sneaked off with the weapon and caught up with the wood-pigeon that woke me every morning with its "hoo-hoo-hoo-ing".
With a sniper's deliberation, I "smoked" him in the top branches of his larch tree. When my father found out, he demanded I eat the bird.
By the time I had plucked it and gutted it, I decided it was better to starve and hide until after dinner. But every weekend, my father would open the freezer, point to the bird and remind me, like an executioner, that his sentence was still in force. Eventually I had to choke down the bird. It was like swallowing flints, and I never fired at another pigeon. I did, however, spend endless happy days practising, ultimately able to hit a rolling ping-pong ball at 20 yards in my home-made shooting gallery.
Traditionally, air rifles are given to children so that they can graduate to game shooting with shotguns. Peter de Lisle, a farmer near Leicester, has taught his three sons to use air rifles for this reason. "They love using their air rifles to shoot twigs, toy soldiers, rejected Airfix models. Having an air rifle is vital in teaching them how to handle a gun physically and to be naturally safe," he says.
"The key to it is drilling in safety," says Christopher Robinson, director of a sporting agency based in Hungerford, who also has three sons, and is keen that they join him pheasant shooting one day. "I started them on a home-made target range in the garden and strictly supervised them shooting at tin cans with a fence as a backstop. From the age of 14, I allowed them to shoot rabbits and pigeons in the fields. The main benefit was that it taught them field craft - how to observe wildlife without disturbing it."
I cannot imagine that the value of instructing children in field craft is likely to sway many minds in Parliament. I assumed at first that the furore must have arisen because all air-guns have become more powerful and deadly over the years. In fact, the power of the guns has not changed, nor has the rule than anyone under 14 must be supervised when shooting. It is only the nation's sensitivity to guns that has changed.
Some nursery and primary schools have enforced a zero-tolerance policy even for plastic toy guns. Yet a four-year study by an expert at the University of London has established that stopping boys playing with toy guns "prevents them from engaging in all kinds of learning".
Perhaps it won't come to a ban. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation is certainly doing its best to stop it. It also runs air-gun training days and has sponsored a new national network of air-gun coaches.
For information on air-gun training days, contact BASC, Marford Mill, Wrexham, LL12 0HL (01244 573000).
21 July 2001: Spiking the country's guns
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/outdoors/main.jhtml?xml=/outdoors/2002/06/29/ogun29.xml&sSheet=/outdoors/2002/06/29/ixotop29.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
When you next see a young boy playing with a water pistol, be prepared to see armed police yelling at him through a loudhailer before spread-eagling the child and frisking him for conkers or catapults.
That day cannot be far off. A group of Labour MPs has started a campaign in Parliament to ban air-guns - only one step up from water pistols. As anyone reared in the country knows, an air rifle is the best present you can give a child of the right age. Nothing in life, not even fatherhood, has made me feel more grown-up and responsible than being presented with my Webley .177 as a child of 10.
My father's sternest commandment was that I must never fire at a living creature. He taught me to revere the safety rules so that I was never tempted to challenge his holy writ - except once. That day I sneaked off with the weapon and caught up with the wood-pigeon that woke me every morning with its "hoo-hoo-hoo-ing".
With a sniper's deliberation, I "smoked" him in the top branches of his larch tree. When my father found out, he demanded I eat the bird.
By the time I had plucked it and gutted it, I decided it was better to starve and hide until after dinner. But every weekend, my father would open the freezer, point to the bird and remind me, like an executioner, that his sentence was still in force. Eventually I had to choke down the bird. It was like swallowing flints, and I never fired at another pigeon. I did, however, spend endless happy days practising, ultimately able to hit a rolling ping-pong ball at 20 yards in my home-made shooting gallery.
Traditionally, air rifles are given to children so that they can graduate to game shooting with shotguns. Peter de Lisle, a farmer near Leicester, has taught his three sons to use air rifles for this reason. "They love using their air rifles to shoot twigs, toy soldiers, rejected Airfix models. Having an air rifle is vital in teaching them how to handle a gun physically and to be naturally safe," he says.
"The key to it is drilling in safety," says Christopher Robinson, director of a sporting agency based in Hungerford, who also has three sons, and is keen that they join him pheasant shooting one day. "I started them on a home-made target range in the garden and strictly supervised them shooting at tin cans with a fence as a backstop. From the age of 14, I allowed them to shoot rabbits and pigeons in the fields. The main benefit was that it taught them field craft - how to observe wildlife without disturbing it."
I cannot imagine that the value of instructing children in field craft is likely to sway many minds in Parliament. I assumed at first that the furore must have arisen because all air-guns have become more powerful and deadly over the years. In fact, the power of the guns has not changed, nor has the rule than anyone under 14 must be supervised when shooting. It is only the nation's sensitivity to guns that has changed.
Some nursery and primary schools have enforced a zero-tolerance policy even for plastic toy guns. Yet a four-year study by an expert at the University of London has established that stopping boys playing with toy guns "prevents them from engaging in all kinds of learning".
Perhaps it won't come to a ban. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation is certainly doing its best to stop it. It also runs air-gun training days and has sponsored a new national network of air-gun coaches.
For information on air-gun training days, contact BASC, Marford Mill, Wrexham, LL12 0HL (01244 573000).
21 July 2001: Spiking the country's guns
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/outdoors/main.jhtml?xml=/outdoors/2002/06/29/ogun29.xml&sSheet=/outdoors/2002/06/29/ixotop29.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878