Ban it! From an article about how animal rights whack jobs are infiltrating hunting groups over in England:
Hunting was banned in 2005 but since then the number of people taking part in the sport has continued to increase, with 50,000 mounted followers expected this year compared to 40,000 in 2004.
This year there are expected to be a further 50,000 supporters following the hunt on foot or in cars in order to put pressure on any new Government to overturn the law.
The Tories have said that if they win the election, they will allow a free vote on repealing the ban.
The same thing happened with assault weapons in this country. Not many people owned them in 1994, but once the government said you couldn’t have one, it got people interested. Much like hunters in the UK, gun owners in the US managed to work around the ban.
If it hadn’t been for the Assault Weapons Ban, I may never have become a gun owner myself. My first gun was a Romanian Kalashnikov, that I got specifically as f— you to people who said I shouldn’t have one. Then I remembered I really used to enjoy shooting as a kid, and it was downhill from there. I think a lot of other people my age have similar stories.
Ditto for me, almost. My first gun was a Taurus revolver, but my second was a Mini-14, which I bought for about $200 more than I should have during the Great Assault Panic of 1994 – only to learn a few months later that the Mini-14 wasn’t even subject to the ban. Oh well.
“If it hadn’t been for the Assault Weapons Ban, I may never have become a gun owner myself.”
I owned guns, but I wasn’t a *gun nut* until the election. The Friday after the election, I bought my first pistol. Just before Tax Day, I bought my first EBR.
Good thing that nobody ever buys supplies of things before they get banned, right? (chuckle)
Yup. My interest wouldn’t have been high eneough to shove me down the slippery slope without the AWB. If they had banned handguns instead in 1994 I might, even then, had not been stirred.
Off the top of my head I can think of 5 people that bought one or more AR’s because of the threat from Obama’s administration to ban autoloaders. As a bonus, they are now passionate about Americans right to own them and each of them will be out in the field hunting deer with it this weekend.
I bought my first gun since childhood election day last year. I overspent by about $300 (idiot!) but balanced out that pain with a steal on a hardly fired Sig from a friend.
Now we just need some political rumblings to rear up again so I can convince my wife to get on board with me getting a Garand…
This is fox hunting. That is a whole culture. Land, horses, training, hounds, cooperative agreements to cross-lands. When Parliament banned fox hunting it attacked the rural heritage of the landed gentry.
The hunters were like guilty liberals used to feeling guilty for the privileges of birth and ancestry. But there is an entire support structure of other rural folk that also are part of that culture and they do not feel guilty. Now those that want to be part of that culture; the landowners, hunters, horse folk whether their sport is hunting or not, hounds handlers, kennel masters, pub owners, waitresses, gardeners. Hundreds of businesses and farms that make up the rural community that has been the bastion of tradition for 1000 years are starting to revolt. I saw this starting when they got blindsided with the hunting ban and the tyranny of the House of Commons over the House of Lords
The question is whether this bottom up rebellion will get any traction on the House of Commons. Or whether the nobles will get some balls and reinstate and take back power from the House of Commons.
I’ll add a second-hand me-too here. I didn’t go out and purchase my first gun (in 1993) as a result of the impending AWB, but the guy who introduced me to shooting had gone on an evangelical (WRT gun ownership) streak as a result of the political climate.
(I believe my SKS was the third gun I bought, and the AR-15 was somewhere around number seven. Ah, to be single again with lots of disposable income.)
Well, I knee-jerked all right, but it was to the Firearms Act of 1968, not this Nikolai-come-lately.
How I wish my grandfather’s knee had jerked in 1934! He left me a couple of nice pieces (and some tent-stakes), but I went through the whole attic, and no Thompson.
I bought my first gun while I was in the Army. A friend talked me into it, I guess because he wanted to shoot it, but didn’t want to actually buy it.
It’s a really nice Chinese mil-surp SKS (not the later, rougher, made-for-Yankee-dollars Norinco). If I’d known then what I know now, of course, I’d have bought the whole rack of them the seller had on display…for $105 ea. (SIGH)
Then a funny thing happened…history. The Berlin wall got torn down, Communism in Russia was on the wane (or so it seemed), and my ‘liberated commie rifle’ took on a whole new meaning to me. It spurred a increased interest in history, politics, and Russian-designed firearms.
Sometime maybe I’ll wax overlong about my first Mosin-Nagant :-D
There’s a whole new generation of us who got started b/c of the Obama Panic, too. I’d imagine there are quite a lot of us who went and got a cheap (well, $100 too much) Romanian for the same exact reason you mention. I probably would not have been so eager to go get one if I hadn’t felt that it might become verboten.
Oh yeah. I was a flintlock, Martini and WWI bolt action man until I found out that I really could have machineguns, but the government really didn’t want me to.
From there it was a short trip to “Fuck you, Homer Cumming’s Ghost, Imma have me a whole buncha them there machine guns!”
Who’s talking about machine guns?
Wait, do you think the Assault Weapons Ban was about machine guns? Because it didn’t ban those. Those have been banned since 1986, and heavily restricted since 1934.
Good grief, no. All I was saying is that governmental attempts to restrict access to machineguns, etc. drove me to get into them.
Same as your experience with “assault weapons”, only more hard core.
Ah, OK… I was confused :)