I Know How to Shoot a Gun

It's hardly a massive hobby in the UK (no, dearest Atlantic cousins, not because we're oppressed), though the shooting business is apparently worth around £2bn a year.

I doubt every single farmer or large landowner in the country has firearms, but many do, including my parents - so to an extent I've grown up around guns, principally air rifles (because within some limitations you don't need a license for them and minors can shoot with them), and shotguns. I doubt I'll ever win any Olympic medals, but I'm a sufficiently good shot to defend myself very well from hordes of rampaging clay pigeons!

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4meAndyou · F

I shot a shotgun once. The 2nd ex wanted to take me hunting. I very nearly broke my upper arm because my little "hunting jacket" was very cute and far too tight for me to be able to bend my arm at the shoulder. 😂

I watch Midsomer Murders sometimes, and I understand that guns in UK must be for hunting only, and must be grandfathered in order to be legal.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@4meAndyou I have only just spotted this - sorry it's some 4 years beyond the OP!

Midsomer Murders is fiction, not documentary - and TV drama makers are not given to accuracy!

guns in UK must be for hunting only, and must be grandfathered in order to be legal.

Not quite true.

Civilian use of guns are allowed, with appropriate licencing and sales control, for "hunting" (i.e. shooting bred game-birds and controlled deer-stalking - not merely killing wild animals for the sake of it); agricultural pest control and similar, and sports target shooting (clays and static).

Farmers have a right to shoot pet dogs that have been let loose and are attacking livestock.

Antique guns are allowed but I don't think anyone would shoot with them. A friend who owned a few sometimes demonstrated the flintlock action, using "black powder", but with no ball in the gun.

What is illegal is manufacturing guns (unless by bona-fide trade or re-activating a disabled gun.

Nor can you buy weapons and ammunition in your local Co-op, even if you hold an appropriate gun licence.

(A friend recounted to me that during a visit to the USA, he could not prove his age to a shopkeeper to be able to buy some beer, yet although a foreign tourist with no gun licence, had no problem buying ammunition in the same shop to replace that he'd expended by invitation on his host's private range!)

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The newspapers sometimes point to x-thousand "firearms offences" in the past year in the UK, but the number is a total of a range of offences under the blanket term. For example, recently my local paper reported the Police raiding a property and recovering several weapons, all powerful air-guns suspected of being used for poaching.

Unlawful shootings of people are, thankfully, very rare. Stabbings are more common, mainly in domestic attacks and between teenage gangs often related to drugs.

Terrorist attacks apart, and those have been by van, knife or bomb anyway, random "mass" shootings in the UK are rarer still - about 4 or 5 in the same number of decades, with the attack in Dunblane Primary School the worst. Though perhaps the recent (August 2024) attack on a children's dancing club in Southport was a similar atrocity albeit by stabbing not shooting - the suspect has been arrested, charged and remanded in custody but not yet tried so we don't yet know the motive.

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I do not, never have and never will, own a gun; and of my relatives, many friends and work-colleagues over my 50+ adult years so far, I have known only about four who owned guns. .One was a farmer with a very small-scale, pheasant-shooting side-business. Another was the antiques-owner, the other two had shot-guns for sports target-shooting.