Animal Aid’s just released Gunning For Children: How the gun lobby recruits young blood. Their “report” reveals that. . . .
Across the country, in high street newsagents such as WHSmith, and on supermarket shelves, children have easy access to publications that encourage and even celebrate the killing of animals for ‘sport’. Shooters are featured posing boastfully alongside animals they have just slaughtered. Grinning young children are also shown holding up or standing over shot pheasants, rabbits, foxes and pigeons.
As you might imagine, Animal Aid Director Andrew Tyler claims his org’s anti “shooting porn” campaign (the telegraph.co.uk‘s characterization) is all about the children.
Children who kill animals for sport in urban areas are considered dysfunctional and a social menace. Yet, Britain has a gun lobby, composed of well-connected groups such as the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) and the Countryside Alliance (CA), that devotes considerable resources towards encouraging children to take up guns at a young age. Their actions are damaging not just to wildlife but also to the emotional development of young people.
The British Association of Shooting and Conservation’s Simon Clarke responded to the campaign
These blithering idiots don’t have a clue about the importance of shooting sports to land conservation, or the connection between firearms and the freedoms established by the Magna Carta. Every man, woman and child in the UK should be fully conversant with firearms. We will do everything in our power to restore respect for shooting sports as part of a wider effort to reclaim our right to personal self-defense, including publishing glossy pictures of guns and game.
No he didn’t. I made that up. He actually said:
Shooting is carried out for a number of reasons. It is either just pest control or shooting game. There is no glorification of the shooting itself, it is a means to an end.
So much for the Land of Hope and Glory then. I mean with a po-faced defense like that it’s no wonder the shooting sports are losing ground in the birthplace of our firearms freedoms.
Good thing magazines are as dead as a Dodo (not the best analogy but there you go). Of course, curious Brits can surf the web for gun porn to their hearts content. Thank God, and Al Gore.