Thank you very much for educating me on this matter , Alastair . It always feels good to be corrected . Another really good British invention in recent years ... Is the May Fair magnum Mauser action .
I am intimately familiar with Eley , Game Bore , Hull and Lyalvale Express cartridges . I have been extensively using Eley cartridges , now ... for more than 61 years in my Belgian shot gun . Eley is 1 of the 5 brands of 12 Bore cartridges ... Which are ALWAYS being commercially imported in to Bangladesh ( The others being : Fiocchi , Lambro , Saga and Sterling ) .
I sincerely do hope that hunting and fire arms ownership not only remains stable .
... But also increases in the next few years . I am pleased to know that the hunting community in Great Britain has remained stable .
It is still quite scary , that people like " Hunt Sabs " ( Who basically dedicate their entire time to sabotaging and harassing law abiding hunters ) ... Can be legally allowed to have web site , where they publicly gloat about sabotaging hunts .
I also find it quite disconcerting that Boris Johnson's government is so frightfully anti hunting . This is made worse , by the fact that the opposition (
Labor Party ) have a flat out agenda to impose restrictions upon hunting and fire arms ownership . So , in essence ... Both political parties in Great Britain want to make life more difficult for hunters .
By contrast ... In America , you have Democrats ( Who target hunting and fire arms ownership ) , but then you have Republicans ( Who defend fire arms ownership and hunting ) .
Once again .... Thank you so much for educating me and helping me obtain an insider's perspective about the current state of hunters and fire arms owners in Great Britain .
Yes, it's a difficult one Major ( I do apologise sir, but I cannot recall your first name).
The hunt sabbing thing mostly popped up around and before the hunting (foxes with hounds) ban in the early 00's (2004 maybe?). They'd been about a lot before hand attached to the extreme animal rights fringe a la PETA, but the ban got them a lot of media attention and subsequently brought them into the mainstream. Once there, the've never really left. They spend their time these days disrupting what remains of the old fox hunting crowd who now do artificial recreations of the sport with scent lines. Lots of bad blood exists betwen the groups as you can imagine and they've caused a lot of aggro, property damage and other offences in their crusade (admittedly not helped in some cases by the perfectly reasonable if ill-considered retailiation by the hunting community).
Having decimated one country pursuit, they're now branding out into game shooting (pheasants mostly). Unfortunately, the general public either doesn't care about shooting at all, doesn't know it exists or have the usual 'gut-feeling' opposition brough on by the likes of Disney teaching that animals are just fluffy people. As such, they get a degree of public support and financial and media backing from organisations like the RSPCA. This makes any real action taken against them politically difficult. Supporting hunting or shooting is certainly not a vote winner here.
As for our political parties. Well. I'd say in fairness to the Conservatives, that actually, they don't generally oppose shooting at an institutional level. They don't support it (see political difficulties re. votes above), but generally are quite happy to ignore this area all together unless they think it's a major vote winner (see knee-jerk reactions after every shooting over here when public perception does genuinely swing against guns briefly).
For Labour, they do oppose it, but on the grounds of class, not moral opposition to shooting as such (for the most part). Their view is that 'toffs' shoot, and for labour, anything that curbs or hurts the 'upper classes' or is seen as supporting the working classes is worthwhile. Personally, I think this perception is wrong as stated in my previous post, but again, British shooting really does struggle with this image problem. A throw back to the old Victorian estates exacerbated by vitriol spewed in the left leaning press outlets about the very upper end of the shooting sports.
See here for an example of the kind of crap peddled to the left leaning elements of UK society:
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...elfth-times-up-for-inglorious-victorian-sport
The real issues though is the bureaucratic elements of government. They do see the reduction of arms in the hands of civilians as a noble goal in and of itself and have worked diligently towards that end. I quote:
"The McKay report was produced in September 1972, but has never been made public. It is known, however, that the first of 70 conclusions reached in a summary of the report was that a reduction in the number of firearms in private hands was a desirable end in itself. The report contained no evidence to justify this conclusion."
Basically every chance they get they pull out this 1972 paper and work their way down the check list of potential restrictions and see what they can get to stick. Sadly, they're not doing badly at the game.
Al.
