You can’t stalk deer with a shotgun.
If you were living in London you would fill out this form (PDF) and take it to the local police station. The local firearms team would then process it. In Edinburgh you’d fill in the same form which should be available from the West Lothian and Borders police, but it’s not online as far as I know.
It is illegal to take deer with a shotgun here, except in very limited circumstances.
The usual American brands get used, as well as CZ/Brno, Tikka, Sako, Parker-Hale and probably others that I can’t think of right now.
Deer hunting is more in the nature of controlling numbers. Muntjac are shot in considerable numbers as they do considerable damage to crops and saplings and the does are permanently pregnant. Road traffic accidents probably take more deer than hunters. Poaching by illegal methods (crossbows, dogs, lamps at night) is also a problem.
Deer hunting in Scotland is usually guided (in US terms) and thus not cheap. Essentially unchecked except for this and the food supply, deer numbers can multiply to unhealthy levels and the tendency is to take too many stags and not enough does.
Didn’t the Commonists tend to use Kalashnikovs?
Are da rulez on gun-ownership applied equally across class lines? I read in a magazine 10 years or so ago that Prince Phillip has a breathtakingly large and valuable personal collection of guns. The same article implied that similar collections were held by other members of the aristocracy while basically being forbidden to common people. The author seemed to have a real hard-on for the upper classes, so I never knew whether to accept his claims or not.
Having worked in psychiatry in Northern Ireland, which has a reasonably large rural population, I was always surprised to find out that a lot of our clients had firearms.
Not illegal handguns, surprisingly, given our history, it was usually licensed shotguns or rifles for the purposes of pest control or clay pigeon (skeet) shooting.
Your licence usually doesn’t last very long if you have been admitted to hospital with a psychotic illness.
A great incentive to seek help. :smack:
Is it possible to purchase surplus Enfield SMLEs in Britain the way you can in the US? Or are former military rifles not allowed?
Yes, it’s possible. I’ve got several here.
To expand on terminology differences, in the UK “hunting” means following a pack of hounds that are chasing an animal. The activity known in the US as “hunting” is more commonly called “shooting” in the UK. And as already mentioned, what hunting/shooting there is is largely an upper-class activity. In the film "The Queen, they referred to hunting deer as “stalking”, so I assume that is accurate.
As for the type of gun, there are approximately 2 million shotguns in the UK. Large numbers of these are owned by farmers who shoot pests. There are only a few tens of thousands of rilfes. “Hunting” in the American style is simply not done. Plus with a rifle there would be a danger of accidentally shooting someone on the other side of the country. It’s a small, heavily-populated country.
What about fowl hunting? Is that more common?
More common than what? There is no form of wildlife shooting that could be described as anywhere near common. I was born and raised in the country and I have never known anyone other than farmers that shot wildlife.
For information, try this web site. That gives the details of different type of shooting (and I see that shooting deer is indeed called “stalking”, as per my previous post).
Hmmm. According to the Home Office (pdf), as of 2005 there were 358,352 firearms covered by FACs (approx 65% rifles[li]) and 1,383,958 shotguns on shotgun certificates in England and Wales alone. And I believe the majority of rifles are small-bore weapons of e.g. .17 up to .22 centrefire used for vermin control (foxes, rabbits, rats) rather than stalking rifles. They are reasonably common in farming country, as is lamping.[/li]
[*]One oddity of the UK is that high-powered air rifles are actually classed as firearms, so that’s probably skewing the numbers.
there is a considerable amount of wildfowling on the coast, and trap and skeet are fairly popular.
Finally remembered which forum I stumbled across when researching my squirrel problem. If you look through the posts in http://www.airgunbbs.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=6 you will get a fair idea of what goes on, and if you look at people’s sigs you will see what they own/use.
[QUOTE=slaphead]
Hmmm. According to the Home Office (pdf), as of 2005 there were 358,352 firearms covered by FACs (approx 65% rifles[li]) and 1,383,958 shotguns on shotgun certificates in England and Wales alone. And I believe the majority of rifles are small-bore weapons of e.g. .17 up to .22 centrefire used for vermin control (foxes, rabbits, rats) rather than stalking rifles. They are reasonably common in farming country, as is lamping.[/li]
[li]One oddity of the UK is that high-powered air rifles are actually classed as firearms, so that’s probably skewing the numbers.[/li][/QUOTE]
That will teach me for being lazy and going from memory, which is inexcusable when I have the 2001 version of the home office document on my hard disk. It is interesting to see that the numbers have increased from 2001, given at that time the overall numbers had decreased every year for at least the last twelve. In 2001 there were 1,320,883 shotguns and 296,849 firearms.