Evilv

Would an HMR be humane against a plesiosaur, or should one use a .223? There's a dodgy looking pond on some of my shooting.

Exactly.....and whilst it's sort of commendable/brave to pipe up and say what's right and wrong and how should we help in relation to rehabilitation etc. how one's tune might change if a known peadophile moved up the street should they have youngsters? There's a weird, dwarfish, Lord of the Rings troll kind of a guy lives near me. He stalks about looking really like he just walked of a hobbit film set. Couple of years ago, he was done under that child porn sting thing where people had given their credit card details to visit nasty sights on the web. He had a few pictures and was one of the milder offenders -I gather they were of sub 18 year old girls, but not the grotesquely horrible things that some of these nonces have been into. Anyway, everybody knows him, some of the kids shout 'hobbit' and 'dwarf' at him when he goes past and nobody speaks to him. The one I feel sorry for is his mother. She lives there and suffered the indignity and shock of having her house searched for several days when it came to light. She's a nice woman. I helped her sell her husband's motor bike when he died a few years back. She walks about like a ghost, looking at the ground. She used to be quite sociable.

National Gamekeepers Organisation costs £30 with £10 million for lawful shooting activities, but nothing else much. Also check out the thread about trespassers of yesterday. There was a guy there saying that some other shooting organisation also included legal cover which BASC may or may not chose to cover in your case. One member in the thread had legal problems that BASC may well not cover, so he said. This post is purely for information about alternatives. Each organisation offers different benefits and costs. You pays your money and you makes your choice.

This is a good post as was Baggsy's and LS. I've only read the first two pages, but most of the contributions are mad. Nobody here sympathises with child abuse, especially not with the most horrible abuse of the very young which is deeply monstrous and beyond explanation. The suggestion that LS is a sympathiser is offensive. The problem is what to do with recidivist criminals and make no mistake, a large proportion of criminals are habitual offenders, not just child abusers. Actually, I have read research papers from the States that show that sex offenders are reconvicted much less often than other criminals THOUGH THERE ARE A SMALL PROPORTION OF PREDATORY MADMEN WHO MAKE A LIFELONG HABIT OF IT. These according to the American research are much less common than is often believed. We are the subject of a myth put about by lefty social workers here that SEX OFFENDERS IN GENERAL are incurable. They are less incurable than burglars, violent thugs and thieves. None of this takes away the fact that we are more revolted by what they have done. I do think though that this has become the new 'witchcraft' - the thing that has the mob howling for mutilation and a painful death. What's more, any of you lot who have looked longingly at some 15 and half year old trollop, half dressed on the high street share the same tendencies - maybe that is what makes people start calling for mutilation and putting the unpleasant Mr Gad into a cage with wild animals. Our prisons in general are hopelessly lost. Gangsters, I read this morning have made several jails dangerous. What I want to know is why prisoners are walking about hurting one another, intimidating staff, and getting away with it. Jails should be single celled units or cages. No prisoner should be free to injure anybody, because they should all be totally confined alone. In my jails if I was in charge, inmates would receive only a survival diet unless they fully cooperated with education and rehabilitation. Most prisoners are almost totally uneducated. They would be confined with a firewalled computer system which presented education and rehabilitation material and nothing else. Cooperation and effort would lead to rewards like association, sport, better food, and family visits. Violence, insubordination, corrupting others and idleness would mean solitary confinement, less and worse food, and no privileges whatsoever. The idea that we allow prisoners to wander around injuring one another, bullying staff, and perverting others shows how far gone this country is.

I agree. The violence of that blow would be at the least very serious if not fatal.

You are probably quite right about landowners and agents rights. I'm sure you are in fact, BUT I'd be wary of how a court might interpret my attempts to eject with minimal force and their judgments about WHO these rights of ejection are aimed at. Take a landowner's right to eject travelers illegally camping (trespassing) on farm land. Probably a court would take it as correct that a landowner could hire a security company to eject them if they refused point blank to cooperate, that might mean laying hands on them and escorting them away to the boundary. However, I'd bet money that if a farmworker or a gamekeeper were to lay hand on me because I had missed a footpath and refused to go back, but instead offered to go by a non-damaging alternative route, he'd be guilty of assault. Likewise if some youth came on a golf course at night to scratch an itch with his girl in the dark and declined to cooperate with a man in cammo and was manhandled, I expect the agent of the landowner might well have a big problem satisfying the court he was right to get up close and personal. A ***** encampment is a different matter and even these have to be handled very carefully. EDIT: Ah - you didn't intend to quote me and now I have replied as if you did... No worries Bagsy. It's a terrible wet day and I can't go out shooting up here in the northern wildlands. Maybe I'll go and buy some more HMR ammo instead of ratcheting on here.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that tresspass is an arrestable offence. This means that you have no right to detain them. Maybe if you found them carrying armfulls of property that they had stolen that would be different. As an ordinary citizen you would have no rights to do anything other than hold a conversation with them. Put a hand on them and you could be held to have assaulted them. I think you may be very lucky that they ran away. You could have been far more in the wrong then them. While carrying a firearm in this country cool heads are better than righteous indignation. If you had arrived in close proximity to them with firearms they could easily have claimed you threatened them with them. Threat is much more a matter of how the recipient of it feels rather than how you intended it so in fact you may well have threatened them since they felt threatened by your angry shouting and rushing at them armed to the teeth. By the way - you are there to shoot rabbits not patrol like Dirty Harry. This isn't Bagdhad and you are not Blackwater Inc. EDIT: Ah - it's all been said as I now see on reading further. I think you are lucky to still have your rifle to be honest, however upright your intentions were.

The thing I'm taking away from all these horror stories is that the man who mocks all these people as fools and thinks himself 'safe', is lining himself up to be the next person to do something unthinkably stupid. There is not a man among us who could not, given the right distraction, or 'off day' hangover, make the possibly fatal error of momentarily forgetting safety routines. Somebody a long way back went into a diatribe about how stupid and irresponsible 'these people' are who made mistakes. I'm not as cocky as him. I know I could make a mistake, and that is why I check, and check, and re-check, all the time thinking that a fatal mistake is just one inattentive step away.

Bang on the nail there. When the boom in house prices started it was obviously being fueled by endless amounts of money being thrown at lenders. When I bought my first house in 1975, the bank made it perfectly clear that they would allow 3.5 times the man's wage and would take a dim view of what his wife earned since she would likely have a family before too long. That earnings lending ratio gave you limits beyond which you couldn't go, but until recently, they were pouring silly money in front of people. I've heard tell of well over seven times earnings. People will pay whatever they can get hold of for a house. The only limit is the availability of cash. Then there were the 110% mortgages in terms of loan to value. How ridiculous was that. It was bound to prod the prices upwards. I'm not finished either - the buy to let 100% mortgages meant that any ***** waster could buy a portfolio of houses and put them to rent at high values. More and more money chased up the prices. The result of this is that kids of the age mine are will have a VERY much more hard up time than I did, which is a shame. When I started out, I could pay my bills quite easily and was able to rent a cottage on the farm I had shooting on as well. We had a good life while our kids will be grafting hard and getting nowhere. As for the ********* who bought a half a dozen properties at the peak of the market and now can't cover the rent - F ck them! They deserve what they get. As for the banks, the slimy gets seem able to slither away without taking responsibility for impoverishing a generation and get baled out from the public purse.Adam Applegarth in less restrained times than now would have been strung up from a lamp post and beaten to death. Instead, he walks away from NR with a severance package and a pension pot in the millions! House prices need to come down by at the least 50%. I hope they do. This may seem hard on people who just bought, but it isn't. They still have the house at the price they thought it was worth. When they move up to a new and better one, it will cost them less than it would have done if prices had remained at ridiculous levels. Also... planning laws prevent building where people want to live and force all new building into ever denser cities. Meanwhile, every waster on the planet can walk in here and declare that someone was nasty to his brother and be granted leave to remain here. Even if he isn't granted leave, he can remain anyway and will be competing with our kids for the ever shorter supply of houses.

ROFLMAO - oh yeah. Nobody gets shot by hoodies down south do they? I know where I am well off thanks. Newcastle City Centre If you're a jerk, someone will deck you for sure, but nobody gets shot up here. Yes, lovely picture, the shame being that it was taken mid-day, and all of the street lights had to be on to see through the smog and pollution. I know your joshing, so I'll smile at that nonsense. All the best jokes involve turning the truth on its head after all. Just for you Bob. This one was taken on the day all teh smog works were on holiday. If you are serious, your last visit was in the nineteenth century. Did you accompany Queen Victoria on one of her trips to Scotland and get off the train perhaps? :-)

ROFLMAO - oh yeah. Nobody gets shot by hoodies down south do they? I know where I am well off thanks. Newcastle City Centre If you're a jerk, someone will deck you for sure, but nobody gets shot up here. Yeah right it's like the gunfight at the OK coral at times in the Bigg market...and has been since I started drinking there as a 16 year old. Maybe Mungler is being sarcy/ironic/p*** Taker etc.....and if you're from 'Northumberland why do you need to go into the Toon.....surely you can find a sheep in the countryside you wooly back Yeah, but without the guns and I have never ever been attacked in this town unless I have asked for it by acting like a tw *t, and then only rarely. By the way, the vowell missed is an 'a'. We like to call a spade a spade up here and I don't like that silly profanity filter. I couldn't agree more about that. I have a mate from Liverpool and hes very sound, but they have a horrible maudlin streak there. Remember when Boris had to apologise for telling it as it was about the scousers? I mean - who here doesn't believe that the Hillsborough fiasco was caused ny drunken Liverpudlians pushing into the ground without paying? We saw them on teh tele doing if for F sake.

ROFLMAO - oh yeah. Nobody gets shot by hoodies down south do they? I know where I am well off thanks. Newcastle City Centre If you're a jerk, someone will deck you for sure, but nobody gets shot up here.

It's a doddle, just open the lever fully, they can see clearly that the breech is open and it's 100% safe, leave the tube full. I would rather see a gun like this, than one closed but empty. Yes I take your point and the open lever is a more obvious sign than an open bolt. However, with the CZ, I remove the magazine AND pull the bolt. On the Winchester if I meet and stop to talk to someone, or case the gun to cross a road,I fully unload the gun. That means I need to empty the magazine which is a bit awkward, though perfectly possible. Then I have to cycle the action which ALWAYS involves loading and unloading a live round with the hammer fully back (only has a half cock safety). I have to cycle the action because even though I have emptied the tube, there is ALWAYS a live one already in the claw of the bolt ready to load and that one will only come out by working the lever. Still, it's a nice gun in a nostalgic sort of way and I do enjoy using it. It's extremely light and very good offhand at ranges like fifty or sixty yards. Further than that and I'd have to adopt some other position. There has never been a really calm day to judge the guns accuracy properly since I bought it. I think about a 12 mph wind was the calmest condition I've used it in, but it is stunningly good on long range rabbits even so.

My Winchester 9417 has a nine shot magazine in the tube under the barrel. One thing though, I suspect that it is far quicker to reload a couple of CZ magazines than to undo the end of my tube, slide out the brass carrier and plop in nine new rounds. Also, it is a far less convenient system when you want to unload quickly, like say when you meet someone on the farm and wish to make the gun completely safe. That's a doddle with the CZ. Not so the Winchester.

Northern Ireland Farmer shoots boy in head with .22 rifle.

Completely right. ALWAYS INVESTIGATE the bore after an 'odd' sounding shot. To be honest, the moderated eley subs are so quiet, you'd hardly know whether they fired properly or not. I notice that the bolt and the receiver of my CZ 425 have bleed holes for dispersing escaping gas from the chamber in a reasonably safe direction but I think they wouldn't cope with the whole charge. I suppose they are there to deal with the result of a split or perforated case. The safest way to think about gun has something in common with using a chain saw. ALWAYS recognise that when tired or distracted you can do something uncharacteristically stupid. Being cocky about how safe you are is the wrong way to be. Recognise that fatigue and other things can cause problems and if necessary, unload the thing, case it and go home. There are some pest control methods that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole - lamping with a rifle being one of them. Remember that horrible story a year or two back when a man shot his stepson between the eyes. Makes my blood run cold to think of it. One of my farmers suggested to me that I try lamping one particular field that has a footpath in it. I told him and his wife that story and he then said, 'Actually a few years ago Dave and his mate were lamping there and they had a small and a large lamps. Dave spotted a what he thought was a fox in the small light and aimed at it, but asked for the other one to be brought on the target just to be sure. When it was, there was a woman on the foot path carrying a cat.' I can't vouch for that story, except to say it was told to me in the last ten days.

This happens all of the time in the film industry, I just don't see why it's a such big deal because China has done it. Well I'm bothered about Bob..... in fact I am absolutely gutted. It is has been mentioned the UK goverment's financial committment to the games has cost every British taxpayer a 1000 quid each? Could anyone elaborate further on that rumour?? But the bottom line for me is I want my money's worth and I ain'nt having no fake firework displays or girls miming it when I've paid for a proper show *** mate, Chill out B) "i aint havin no fake firework display....FOOL" ...hahahahahahaha its all gone a bit "Mr T" in here now. The botton line is that they dont give a hoot about the brit wanting to see the games, they will fill it full of visitors and we wont get a look in unless we pay a high price for a crappy seat in the back row. There has been a murder in China whilst the games are on, and they will be forever trying to redeem themselves. When it comes to London, we will have the best handgun team in the world, all about 16 years old, sporting the best "Gats" you have ever seen. Wonder how many murders we will have? I think other countries might send B teams, rather than risk their finest getting stabbed or gunned down. They dont give a **** about us, face it. i wont be going, and i wont be "bigging up" the games over here. Look at what was spent on the Dome, massivley over budget, yet we all paid for that. the stadiums wont be finished in time, we wont be able to transport people around properly, everything will be hashed together last minute. the only people to benifit from the games will be the "Lord Coe's" of the world. all out to line their own pockets, every one of em. You want a "FAKE" games? Ladys and Gents, i give you ...................LONDON 2012. Olympic games? My ****! Martin already said waht I wanted to. I fear he may be right. The Chinks done good in my opinion. Hope we can.

Not sure that I follow this, surely the worlds tv crews and cameras were there filming it? I didn't see it, but I'm with beretta, how so you fake a firework display? Why would China need to? They are probably the world's largest manufacturers of fireworks. Does it matter if the girl was miming? Is that not what 99% of singers do in this country? The excuse for the faked fire works display was that on the night, polluton made the visibility poor and they substituted some pre filmed stuff and I believe some CGI graphics. As for China's performance in delivering the games: I am impressed. I hope we can do as well, but fear that we may deliver a very much less polished and decent set of resources and performances. I hope that I am proved wrong. I am put in mind of the Dome fiasco. How much did that cost us all and how cr ap was it for all the hype and nonsense?

ROFLMAO That means - rolling on floor laughing my ar se off....... What did the insurance company have to say - or were you too embarrassed to tell them? That one puts my rifle primer iidiiocy into the 'very minor' category for maniacal danerousness. I won't say I couldn't imagine doing such a thing myself though, because I can. Anyone who thinks he couldn't make a mistake of ludicrous proportions, is setting himself up to do exactly that. I have seen some terrible mistakes, some of which ended up with serious bodily injury, though only to those who caused them: 1976 I set off a .303 rifle primer in a duff cartridge with a punch and received a nasty reminder in my thumb about my stupidity. 1978. My mate let off a twelve bore right behind me and blew a great crater in the mud about twelve inches from my foot. 1979 I was standing about a yard away from a man who ran a gun club known to other more pucker rifle shooters in the Northumberland Rifle Club as, 'The Bad Reputation Gun Club.' They were right. He was firing solid slugs in rapid succession from a mosberg pump action repeater. he had about five loaded which in those days you were allowed and one failed to fire properly having no powder. it just went click. He fired again and the gun blew up right beside me. It had strips of metal barrel splayed out all over in a most dramatic way. The click was a primer pushing the .729 slug up the barrel about 18 inches, and the boom that followed was caused by the following round coming up into the obstructed barrel. no one was hurt - amazingly. 1980. I saw a man shoot himself in the hand at the same 'Bad Reputation Gun Club, when he was loading a muzzle loading flintlock pistol. he had it on full cock and the trigger caught in his clothing. He had a large ragged hole in his hand where the ramrod and ball went right through. He was also burned somewhat, but that was the least of his troubles. He was severely injured in a car crash about a year later while trying to retrieve a dropped packet of cigarettes from the floor of his van while driving at seventy miles an hour. 1981 At the same ragamuffin gun club, a man clearing up and burning the rubbish, was stuck in the ar se by a pistol round (9mm) which had inadvertently been put in the fire with rubbish such as smashed up targets. 1981 While shooting black powder pistol at the same shockingly bad club, the man next to me had his colt 1860 blow itself in half as the chambers flashed over and several rounds went off at once. He was severely shocked by this and never came back. Since those days, I have mostly shot on my own and have probably increased my life expectancy more than a little.

Sorry John, just found this post and must have seemed churlish for not responding. I would be pleased indeed to PM you and come for a shoot and a few pints in your local. Thank you. If I am ever down that way, I will try and arrange it. meanwhile keep on at those pigeons. Tony

I entirely accept your well deserved rebuke Bob. It was beyond stupid. I was young and ignorant of how much energy was contained in a rifle primer. I suppose I had the view that it was like a cap or something. Looking back on it - and at the time nursing my injured digits, it was an incredibly stupid and wanton thing to have done. I learned a lesson, but not as hard a one as I might have had. Perhaps I had been drinking a little after dinner - it is so long ago, I can't remember. thirty two years is quite a while. We have all done stupid things as kids, most of my childhood was spent playing with wartime explosives that we found everywhere in the 1950's, but 25 is a bit old to be doing such stunts, and a bit young to lose your eyesight. Sorry if I was a bit OTT, but losing an eye like this would have been ridiculous. You weren't OTT at all. It was a VERY stupid thing to have done. I was lucky that it ended with a sore hand. I bought a chain saw on Ebay last winter. Now there's a thing that could really bite you in the ar se. As for wartime explosives, about eighteen years ago I was brewing a cup of tea with two of my sons on a walk in the country and I noticed some aluminium fins sticking out of the rocks in the bracken beside our little fire. I investigated and discovered a two inch mortar shell. Forgetting the tea, I put out the fire and looked again. It certainly looked like a small finned bomb stuck in the rocks. I marked the spot and went to the nearest police station at Ponteland in Northumberland and returned with a cop in a car. On the way out he told me that the place was a war time training range and that folk were often discovering hand grenades and mortars there. We looked it over and he pulled it out of the ground with a rope I had brought with me. He sent for the bomb disposal people from Caterick and they destroyed it, It was a live mortar and when I went back there were a number of new and severe scratches on the sand stone cliffs. I'm kind of glad my fire was where it was and not a foot to the right really. I suppose the moral of the tale is 'Don't light fires in the bracken on old artillery and other ranges - even if you've no idea that that's what they were. Shaftoe Crags - an old training range for hand grenades and mortars - not that anyone wold know to look at it ->

we'll all be ****** Never underestimate the stupidity and simple mindedness of Bush and American hawks. They think they can interfere all along Russia's borders by recruiting nations Bush has probably barely ever heard of into NATO and installing military projects right in Russia's backyard as a sort of macho signal that they won the cold war. Sadly the cold war can spring up again now that Russia has some money and a president that isn't drunk all the time as Yeltzin was. Putin is not a nice man, and he is surrounded by even nastier ones and wounded Russian pride is likely to put more people like that into power. Bush if he had any sense would be making big moves to be friends with Russia. We can all benefit from good relations with them and are all likely to suffer if they go pear shaped. I can remember in the 1960s my parents rehearsing us kids as to what we would do when the Russians fired missiles at us. The tension over the Cuban Missile Crisis really did have the Pentagon urging Kennedy to strike first on Russia. it nearly happned and the Russians were ready with theirn own triggers to respond on the west.

The US is sending humanitarian aid and urging the observance ofc ease fires. That is fine with me. It is a dangerous situation and in any case, whatever implications it has for us outsiders and NATO members, it is tragic when any people are displaced or killed in military actions which is why I am so dead set against their unwise use or the threat thereof. Make no mistake though, Georgia's hot headed use of force killed about 2000 South Ossettian mostly Russian national civilians, which is why Russia was bound to react violently. Saakosville's troops shelled civilian people in a province that has had independence since 1992. What was he thinking of? I heard a BBC report this afternoon in which Georgians were interviewed and were denouncing Saakosville for his stupid use of force against South Ossetia caliming that they had lost all they had because of the reaction to it. Governments who use violence against others, even if they are wishing to separate from their control have it coming when they get a bloody nose. Don't forget that South Ossettia separated from Georgia inn 1992 and has been running as an autonomous territory since then. Most of its citizens are ethnic Russians. Even GWB has more sense than to send troops to Georgia to do more than deliver humanitarian supplies. It would be much more provocative than the Russians sending fighting men to Cuba. Georgia actually borders Russian territory.

I entirely accept your well deserved rebuke Bob. It was beyond stupid. I was young and ignorant of how much energy was contained in a rifle primer. I suppose I had the view that it was like a cap or something. Looking back on it - and at the time nursing my injured digits, it was an incredibly stupid and wanton thing to have done. I learned a lesson, but not as hard a one as I might have had. Perhaps I had been drinking a little after dinner - it is so long ago, I can't remember. thirty two years is quite a while.

It's very disconcerting when it happens. When removing the cartridge from the gun after a couple of minutes, it is a good idea to keep your head and other body parts away from the breach. In the extraordinary event that the thing went off with the breach open, the case would come back out of there with extreme violence. Point the open breach in such a case away from you and others. Just in case anybody is as syupid as I was at the age of twenty five, I once had a reloaded .303 cartridge that went wrong as I pushed the bullet in and the neck folded a bit. It was obviously useless so I pulled the bullet and emptied the powder. Now I had a capped case and didn't want to put it in the bin. Being VERY STUPID, I decided to set off the primer before disposal. I am now ashamed to say that I put the case in a vice and put a punch and hammer to the primer........... Yes - I know it was VERY DANGEROUS. I found out the hard way, though not as hard a way as I might have had. The primer left the case with great violence and injured me in the hand . It ripped a lump out of my thumb and left me with a considerable bruise. I think I was lucky. If I had arranged things differently I could have shot myself in the eye. Maybe dealers should insist on an intelligence test before they supply reloading equipment. this would have saved me an injury because obviously, I wouldn't have been supplied with the stuff to hurt myself. Reloading is more dangerous than some people think.