As you may have guessed Dave, I am passionate about legitimate firearms use and when it all boils down to it the only people who get critisesed are firearms users.
It doesn't help when you see witness's interviewed describing how this nutter had a "massive rifle with massive telescopic sights and a huge silencer, the gun was nearly touching the ground and he had to hold it at 45 degrees because it was that heavy"
It was a .22 rimfire, which is a small firearm for shooting rabbits !!
Statements like that directly affect me and the knee jerk reactions directly affect me, so I have every right to complain and spit out my dummy.
This may sound selfish and it isn't meant to be, but the quicker the police had acted the lesser the impact on normal firearms certificate hiolders like myself. Within 12 hours of this happening, there were people being interviewed, including politicains, about firearms laws and how we can tighten them.
We already have the tightest gun laws in the world. I particularly have more reason than most to moan as the last time this happened the knee jerk reaction was to ban pistols, which robbed me of a chance to get into the olympic pistol team. It also makes it worse for us to go about our business as everytime someone sees someone with a gun (even in a bloody field) they call the police. I am getting fed up of armed response coming out to check me out despite it being quite obvious I am legitamately there.
Last time I was zeroing my rifle, off the bonnet of my fully sign written landrover, in a 50 acre field in full veiw of around 100 houses to one side and I was 50 yards away from the farm house. Some idiot with binoculars wasted police time reporting me, knowing full well I was there legitamately.
Incidents of illegal guns are rife, people are shot on a daily basis but we hear very little. I'm sorry about the 12 people killed but that is a small number compared to the yearly uk death rate of illegal guns, yet there is a massive uproar. Perhaps if the number of illegal gun related incidents happened all on the same day it might get a bit more attention and make people realise that there are probably more illegally held firearms owned by drug selling gangs and wanna be gangsters than there are held legally. There are only 800,000 certificate holders in the uk
Read these figures, it will make your toes curl
Firearms Offences - England & Wales
We just get hammered all the time and it's about time the police got the hammering for not doing their job right, not the likes of me that has nothing whatsoever to do with some nut rampaging about the countryside killng folk