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SPORTING SHOOTER - MAY 2005
A friendly old
fashioned copper called in this morning – he sometimes comes to
check that my coffee mugs are secure and up to date. This chap is fond
of shooting and does a bit of beating as well. He was beating for one
of the big shoots back in the season and learned later that the telephone
lines to the police station had been hot with people reporting shots
and men with guns wandering about. Now this was not suburbia, this was
darkest Northumberland, although it is fast becoming suburbia and the
sort of people who are coming in are not the sort who you would really
be comfortable with as neighbours. They do not like the countryside
as it is. They do not like the mud and the blood and most of all, Mate,
they don’t like you. Yes YOU - you with your terriers and your
lurchers and your ferrets and those nasty guns. So they will try to
get rid of you. They are doing well with hunting and now they are going
to make your life hell. We are entering the era of the malicious telephone
call and, for those of you who are not already familiar with it, Section
5 of the Public Order Act (at least, I think that that is what it is)
may not know that it is a criminal offence to ‘harass or frighten’
anybody by any action of yours. Just walking along a footpath with your
gun under your arm may ‘frighten’ someone. They only have
to report their ‘fear’ to the Police along with the fact
that you have a red face and have forgotten to shave and you will find
yourself at the sharp end of a criminal investigation. Remember you
will not, on the whole, be dealing with the old fashioned country copper
– that breed is fair nigh extinct. The New Copper is, like the
New Countryman, almost exclusively town bred and urban in thought, word
and deed – you ask our Editor (all bow) about his recent experience
with one of this breed in connection with the renewal of his FAC. I
bet none of you realised that guns can kill. You get yourself in trouble
with a Public Order charge and you will give the New Coppers the perfect
excuse to say that you are not a ‘fit person’ to own a firearm.
I have known and liked many Gamekeepers over the years, but I have to
say that not all of them would win a PR prize, most especially when
they are worried about their precious birds. But their worries now will
be as nothing to what they will be when the ‘Right to Roam’
gets into top gear. All shooting people will have to ‘gan vurry
canny’. You may think it perfectly reasonable to wander about
the woods ‘cammoed’ from head to toe and carrying a loaded
rifle and a stick, but, to the New Countryman, you may well look like
the local branch chairman of Al Quaeda. He/ she may well be ‘frightened’
and you may well be in trouble. Think, as they say, on.
