Gun Culture

Monday, November 20, 2006

EU Referendum Petition

Generally speaking I consider petitions to be a waste of time, quite literally not worth the paper they’re written on.  On-line petitions even more so.
I’ve been pointed to a petition on the 10 Downing Street E-petitions website which calls for a referendum on Blighty’s continued membership of the EU.  Even if it were to receive 20 million signs the bastards in government would poo poo it, but it costs nowt.
Some of the other petitions are rather jolly too.
Castrate serial pedophiles - quite a few signed this one but I can’t help feeling that greater impact might be possible if paedophile were correctly spelled.
Stop wasting money on pointless “e-government” websites such as this one - fantastic!

Of course this one I had to sign
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to take the war to criminals by permitting law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Shooting Times Again

Following on from my earlier missive regarding the elitist article in the Shooting Times which read like a diary entry from Rebecca Peters, the Shooting Times were good enough to print my letter and that of another fellow incensed at the affrontery of the implications of the author of the offending article.
This week the fellow has his right of reply which I reproduce below:

I would like to reply to the letters published last week in response to my article.  The 20,000 annual murder rate in the US is often quoted.  How high the rate would be if some states adopted gun laws similar to our own can only be guessed, but it would certainly be much lower Precisely how many pistols are kept in cars in the US is similarly unknown, but common sense dictates a very circumspect reaction to a traffic accident.
I am of course happy to be educated by the NRA; indeed I spent two hours in its excellent museum in August, absorbing much knowledge and many insights.  But I think that BASC and the Countryside Alliance do a better and more responsible job in representing the real interests of the British shooting community thatn the NRA does for the Americans.
Lastly banning pistol shooting after the Dunblane massacre in 1996 was bad and unnecessary legislation, and was even admitted to me at the time to be so by a Conservative MP.  The prime minister at the time, John Major, should have sacked the chief constable of Stirling for the gross incompetence of his force in allowing Thomas Hamilton to have firearms.  Instead, Mr Major took the seemingly easier route of banning pistols

Where to start?
OK, I’ll start by reproducing my emailed response

Your correspondent Ian Thorne speculates how the murder rate might be affected if strict ‘gun control’ laws were to be enacted in the US.  He need not speculate, the evidence is there.  In areas such as Washington D.C. and New York City very strict gun laws are enacted including handgun bans and storage laws.  In these areas gun crime is significantly higher than in surrounding states where more relaxed gun laws are in force, including Virginia the state in which Mr Thorne fears a shoot out following a traffic shunt.  I personally would be more worried about a road rage attack in the UK than I would in Virginia.
As for UK organisations doing a better job of representing the shooting community than the US NRA, it should be noted that the US NRA is at the forefront of driving back gun grabbing laws whereas our organisations are losing the fight against oppressive law.  The reasons for this are complex and down to differences in our society but a major factor is certainly the narrow blinkered focus of one or two of our larger organisations who seek to distance themselves from other areas of gun sports which they do not consider as worthy as their own, a classic case of divided we fall.

A minor point from Mr Thorne’s last paragraph I didn’t mention was that the Conservative government did not ban all pistols, this was done by the incoming Labour government.  Major’s lot would have left us with .22lr pistols.
Mr Thorne has swallowed the gun grabbers bullshit book of America.  A land of car lot shoot outs and murders caused by guns.  He clearly forgets that Blighty is a very violent place with no shortage of criminals killing people with guns.  He is a hunter and a sportsman, but only in the style of Senator John Kerry.  With friends like these the cause of the GCN is very rosy indeed.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Shooting Times - the gun grabbers friend

I look forward to Thursdays and my latest fix of countryside and firearms news in the form of Shooting Times.
This week featured a review of the National Shooting Museum at NRA HQ in Fairfax (USA of course).  When I got to the paragraph entitiled ‘States of Disarry’ I was astounded It reads like a press release from the Gun Control Network! 

It’s unlikely that the Founding Fathers had in mind the frightful consequences to which this blunt reading of the consititution has led, however: 20,000 Americans murdered each year, largely by armed assailants

Can a shooter really believe that the 20,000 Americans he says are killed each year would be alive if it weren’t for the Second Amendment?  Notice that he uses the headline number and then says ‘largely by armed assailants’, sneaky tricks one expects from a gun grabber.

It is certainly unwise to get into an arguement after a traffic accident, as many drivers carry guns

Does he truly swallow the anti-gun propaganda that says any road incident will lead to a shoot-out?  Or that legally held guns are the cause of mass murder?  If he really does feel that way then he would have done better to talk to some of the good folks at the NRA instead of trooping around the museum and given them an opportunity to educate the falsehoods out of him.
I for one wish we had a fine organisation like the NRA in the UK, maybe then we would not have seen shooters betrayed and let down by our own so-called representative bodies as we saw in 1988 and 1996.

I’m proud to be a Life Member of the NRA and ashamed to be a reader of the Shooting Times.