Gun porn: Put shooting magazines on the top shelf where they belong

(GETTY IMAGES)

A collection of magazines portraying pretty porcelain faces, mouthwatering home cooked dishes, high street fashion and quaint country properties are displayed along the supermarket shelves. Among them is the front cover of a glossy country sport magazine. It typically shows a smiling Gun striding through rough fields, shotgun slung across his shoulder, with perhaps a couple of bloodied rabbits hanging head down from their hocks and reads: “Be a better bunny shooter” and inside: ”Here are the top tips for close range rabbit shooting.”

This cover is emblematic of all gun magazines – promoting the killing of live animals for pleasure to viewers including children – and puts the sport of shooting into perspective, and hopefully where it belongs, up there on the top shelf out of the reach and sight of children.

What a coincidence, therefore, that the UK’s largest animal rights organisation, Animal Aid, is calling for a ban on the sale of gun magazines to children at the same time a research paper, released by Professor Essi Viding of University College London, reveals one in every 100 children is a psychopath. As if these findings aren’t troubling enough. Do we really want to encourage more children to develop traits lacking in empathy, absence of compassion and acts of remorseless cruelty?

The whole idea is just about as macabre as blood sports get. Where is our sense of responsibility to protect against the unhealthy and damaging effects these graphic violent depictions have on vulnerable and impressionable young minds? Why are we endorsing acts of brutality and bloodshed to children? Desensitising them to such aggressive deeds and teaching them that this kind of behaviour is a valid and acceptable response in life?

Two of the UK’s biggest mobile network providers have already taken a stand and block access to shooting websites for under 18s stating their content as “inappropriate”. Why then are we still selling this same “inappropriate” content to children in magazines?

And yet the pro gun lobby like the Countryside Alliance actively encourages children to take up the sport and relies heavily upon capturing new recruits at an early age. David Foster states on the Shooting Gun website that children as young as six “are ready and able to spend a day with the beaters”.

The pro gun lobby’s own research reveals that unless children are participating in the sport by the age of 14 the chances of people getting involved at a later stage are much diminished. So it is important for them to continue to disseminate pictures that glorify the sport and specifically target ‘young shots’, as they call them. In doing so, their magazines routinely show images of proud shooters boasting about their kill; row upon row of slain animals are laid out to be admired and dead rabbits, game and pigeons are triumphantly held aloft. And there we have the wanton killing of animals for sport presented as nothing but one big celebration.

There are children as young as seven who have a shotgun certificate in this country. But what is unbelievable is that you don’t actually need a certificate to be able to go shooting. As long as the parents are present, youngsters of any age can use their parents’ shotgun.

Labour MP Thomas Docherty is introducing a bill to ban under 14s from gaining “unfettered access” to shotguns and obtaining a shotgun licence, the Countryside Alliance described him as “blinkered and prejudiced” and went on to say that children with shotgun certificates “should be upheld as role models in society”. But children of this age have barely the physical strength to handle a shotgun, let alone the mental maturity to deal with the weapon’s lethal nature and all its loaded symbolism.

Indeed, to me the ‘sport’ of shooting animals for fun is every bit as explicit and offensive as the hard core magazines already consigned to the top shelf. To begin with it’s another industry dominated by men, in which sentient beings are sadistically exploited. I see an animal objectified and represented as a ‘thing’ whose purpose is to serve and gratify man’s desires. In pursuing their indulgence, the target is shown no respect and treated as if it has no feelings of its own or the capacity to suffer. Its life is regarded of no intrinsic value but to be used and tossed away. This sport only promotes the degradation and abuse of the defenseless and demeans their worth in a salacious society. And just like porn, shooting is all about emotional disconnection, not emotion connection. Is this the kind of attitude we want to foster in our children?

Cold blooded shooting is bad enough, but turning six year olds into close range bunny shooters is beyond any civilised society. A responsible government would shoot the sport in the head once and for all. Consigning “shooting porn” to the top shelf would be a start.

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• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  Pest control is necessary to protect crops and livestock, and to control non native invasive species such as grey squirrels and mink, which do terrible damage to native wildlife.

  So, we should get our meat from the supermarket? I guess meat just grows in polythene packaging does it? Shooting wild animals for meat is humane, as the animal dies quickly and painlessly one day after living a wonderful life in the wild. Most meat in the shops is factory farmed meat, and a lot of it is imported from other countries, where they have lower welfare standards than we do.

  Shooting does take a lot of skill, and it is you who is probably not listening to yourself or reading through your posts before you post them. Why don’t you try it and see how much skill it really takes, rather than posting rubbish?

  Also, try to use reasoned argument instead of childish insults. Your post is reminiscent of a four year old having a tantrum – facts and logic go out the window.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  You cannot secure chickens fully. People used to lock chickens in sheds day and night, but no one wanted those eggs. Everyone wants free range. You can secure a hen house where the chickens stay during the night, but what about during the day when the free range ones wander about outside?

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  And what happens to the shot game after sport shooting? The answer – all of it is eaten, virtually without exception. If you shoot for fun, the shot game should always get eaten.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  Here we go. More baseless anti shooting prejudice.

  If shooters were really psychopaths, then how did any of them manage to get a shotgun license?

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  Not sure a bell would stop pet cats breeding to create hybrids with Scottish Wildcats though. Scottish Wildcats are critically endangered in Britain because of breeding with pet cats.
  Animals which are shot for sport are later eaten. There are few exceptions to this. As long as it is eaten later, there is nothing wrong with shooting for sport.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000762284093 Reece Cameron Fowler

  6-7 rabbits eat as much as one sheep. When you have loads of them, it all adds up. I know farmers who have had to re-seed whole crop fields because of rabbits destroying the crop. If that does not count as “harm”, I don’t know what does.

  I think I’m right in saying that in some areas, excessive grazing and burrowing can cause erosion.

• stonedwolf

  I agree it’s less-worse than fox-hunting for that reason, but it’s also the mindset of stabbing a sow, for fun, prior to the baconisation process.