Not funny
Some years ago, I was a registered firearms dealer with my own premises etc. I went to several weapons manufacturers in the course of my work, and thoroughly enjoyable it was too! On my travels I came across a pair of semi-automatic rifles from the same manufacturer, one "General" grade and one "Sniper" grade. On examination, I found that I could probably turn a "General" grade into a "Sniper" grade with some minimal hand-fitting and a couple of specially machined parts. I did so and found that I could sell these modified rifles for £500 less than the official sniper grades AND make.............wait for it...........£1,000 clear profit!
Over the next three months, I demonstrated the new modded rifle and took 500 deposits, yep 500!!
I took delivery of the unmodded rifles on partial credit, safe in the knowledge they were all pre-sold and set to on the gruelling job of making £500,000.

When I'd finally finished them all and had the proof house check my work (a bit more expense but what the hell!) I sent letters for my customers that their rifle was ready and they could, with the right paperwork, come and pick it up.





That day, Michael Ryan ran amock in Hungerford.

Very soon after, the Home secretary suspended all semi-automatic rifle permissions on Firearm Certificates. My rifles could not be sold.

Very soon after that, the police came and confiscated my stock (illegally, I subsequently found, too late and too expensive to fight it)and destroyed it.


Instead of the cool £500k in cash I was expecting I was in shit street. The rifles hadn't been paid for fully and the company couldn't take them back as they had been destroyed. I had to pay the deposit money back, some of which I'd used to fund the project.

That's how I ended up with the dodgiest mortgage in Christendom and a deep deep hatred for politicians and the police.


Apologies for lack of humus, but the girth makes up for that.
(Captain Placid 24/7 ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 14:45, 26 replies)

I Feel For You
I really do.

But I'm a gun-control nut. I don't think there's any reason, ever, for a private citizen to have guns in their home.

But I'm all in favour for privately owned guns to be held, very securely, in a gun club, where the owners can blaze away at whatever they feel like. If the weapons are held at a gun club then I don't see the point of any restrictions. You can own and shoot what you like. 'Cos guns are cool as fuck as long as you're not actually killing something/body.

But the gun laws in Britain, strict as they are, should be stricter. A lot of people I know own shotguns as they're farmers.

Have you seen what a shotgun can do when used by someone who's grown up with them....?

Legless Edit: By a spooky coincidence I've just been looking at the x-ray of some poor 22 year old who accidentally discharged a shotgun into his foot. It's a fucking mess. Three toes are just powder and the other one is shattered in several places. The contamination from the lead shot is immense, a lot of the shot broke up and is now tiny fragments suffusing the tissue. The actual wound is a fairly small entry wound, indicating that the barrel must have been really close to his foot, but the exit wound is a fucking crater. He doesn't have much left of the sole of his foot.

The only bright spot is that he still has a completely intact big toe. Another plus is that he still has blood supply to what's left of his toes but fuck knows how they can repair or reconstruct what's left. My bet is partial amputation. He'll have a big toe and half a foot.
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:00, closed)

I'm with Legless
Michael Moore might have become a bit of a pain in the arse of late, but Bowling for Columbine made for unsettling viewing, even if it was exaggerated in a lot of places. I could go on a rant about the American attitude towards guns...another day, perhaps.

Nevertheless, Captain, you have clearly been an innocent victim of shitty circumstances and you deserve a sympathy click - it could have happened to anybody, not just a firearms dealer.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:13, closed)

Nazis!
Why are people who like guns treated like shite?

How many people are killed on the roads? do they ban cars? No!!!

Why?

Because they make too much money from it!

arseholes!
(Lip Up Fatty Fatty Reggae still loves BBQ food on, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:19, closed)

You have my....
....sympathy Capn, you really do. As an old target shooter (never semi-auto or pistol) i was on too young to remember the Hungerfod thing but old enough to remember the Dunblane massacre.

Unfortunaely politicians always rush through these ill-thought out laws but at the time they simply dont have another option. They are faced with a tragedy and simply cant do anything but ban what caused it. Despite the fact that firearms crimes are hideously more prevelant post bannings.

I have a feeling we all could go on about this until the cows come home though? :)
(Grove is the collector of WOO and hoarder of YAY, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:27, closed)

Circumstances
Thanks for the sympathy guys. We differ on the gun control issue. I agree that there are a lot of shotgun owners out there that shouldn't be allowed even a water pistol. However, when the government took away all the LEGALLY-HELD firearms (see where I'm going with this?) it didn't lower the levels of gun crime. In 1989, when I last held an FAC, street shootings were rare. Now, they are not. The vetted, security-conscious, police checked certified sane (really, the authorities checked with your doctor to see if there was any history of mental illness) responsible gun owners were never the problem.

But bankrupting us and taking away our posessions and livelihood made such great headlines.
(Captain Placid 24/7 ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:31, closed)

na, serves you right
no sympathy at all. would have been better if you had shot yourself by accident.

oh, and people who deal with guns are treated like shite because like drunk drivers or people who speed, they are shites.
(sarcasminasuit, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:33, closed)

Wow...
...What an interesting contribution there. With absolutely zero responses to anything, qotw,talk,links on this site please kindly go away :) Thankyou!

Yes its always a very desicive issue isnt it. A close friend of mine have huge arguments over this despite the fact that we agree on practically everything else! It always becomes much more than a simple argument when someones life is lost or career is wrecked.

Ho hum.
(Grove is the collector of WOO and hoarder of YAY, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:40, closed)

Guns vs Cars
I get annoyed at the whole "cars kill do they ban them" because a gun is specifically designed to injure or kill what it is being fired at. A car is specifically designed to transport people from A to B (and unless you have a shit car back home to A).

That being said I'm with Legless shooting stuff is fun and licensed gun ranges are brilliant. I doubt the good Captain would be selling these guns illegally to people without a license, the problems arise when people get them through the black market so don't get all high and fucking mighty saying he doesn't deserve sympathy because one twat ruined his legit (and brilliant) idea for making some money.

Go cry at Gustav Emil Ern for making kitchen knives as well while you're in your ivory tower as in the UK I am pretty sure more people die from knife than gun related incidents because any twat over 18(?) can buy one.

Captain - have a click, sorry about your loss
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 15:51, closed)

The one point...
...i would like to add is one that i think is one that is often not overlooked as such but not realised.

Before i go on i would like to say i agree with all the points being made :P As i said before its such a hard argument!

When i used to shoot i used to help out at my rifle range. I was fairly young so all i could do was just help clean the place and that. The thing that i always found interesting was that on the pistol only nights most of the people were disabled. This was simply because it was one of the few sports available to heavily movement restricted people that they could compete with everybody else on an equal level.

It wasnt just the competition either. It was a social thing that was more important. They got to get out of the house a few nights a week and spend a few hours with people, having a chat, cups of tea and shooting the odd card or two. I basically spent my evenings helping people in and out of wheelchairs :P

You should have seen their faces when they got told the club was being shut down and their sport taken away. It broke my heart.

G

EDIT due to shocking spelling..again
(Grove is the collector of WOO and hoarder of YAY, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 16:05, closed)

It is indeed a tricky one
I went pistol shooting on a stag weekend, and holding a gun and firing it was really scary. I don't really think that private citizens need to have guns in their houses, in fact I'm pretty sure (but don't quote me on this) that in the US, people with guns are more likely to be shot themselves, I think it might even be with their own weapons.

But then you have Switzerland where every house has a gun in it as every single man in Switzerland is a member of the armed forces and they have hardly any gun crime. I guess being a trained soldier probably gives you more respect for the weapon, but it's still an interesting one.

And for the car debate, what a stupid fucking response. Cars aren't banned because "it would be too expensive". Cars aren't banned because cars aren't designed to fire steel spikes hundreds of yards with pinpoint accuracy. Twat.

Gets a click though because it was an excellent scheme to make money.
(Bazongaloid, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 16:09, closed)

Captain, have a click
I don't like guns. However, guns don't kill people, rappers people do.

However, I hate politicians even more than I hate guns.

So I clicked.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 1 Aug 2008, 16:27, closed)

hmmmm?
guns are bad

mmkay?

*frowns*
( spimf ™ is whoever you want him to be, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 17:00, closed)

A few thoughts
First, it's a damn shame that England is now a neutered nation. I lived in London as a child, loved the UK, but the right to own firearms is one of the reasons why I am very glad to live in the US now.

Secondly, the difference between a 'sniper' versus a 'general' grade rifle is primarily in the quality of the barrel. No single element of a rifle has a greater effect on accuracy than the barrel. How could you possibly bring those rifles up to sniper specs without re-barreling them? Were you actually testing them at, say, 400 yards at demonstrating 4 inch groups at that distance?

As for those of you who are having a fit over the idea of anyone owning a firearm, I hunt for all of my family's meat. This is how we get our food since prices for grain and meat have more than doubled. It's also a damn sight more ethical than paying for some meat from some poor pig or chicken that's been tortured it's whole life in a cage. Yes, a firearm is a necessity for subsistence hunting unless you are a full-time hunter-gatherer who can afford to hunt for days on end with a bow and arrows before getting a deer. If you have to go to a day job every day and only get to hunt for an hour or so after work, you need a rifle in order to reliabily feed your family.

Living about 20 minutes away from the nearest police station, the only protection against a criminal at my home is a firearm. I'd be long dead by the time a police officer showed up after a call for help.

Then there are the non-native coyotes that killed my neighbor's dog last year and present a constant danger to my own pets and small children. I live in a rural area where we deal with bears, bobcats and coyotes on a weekly basis. All of these creatures probably seem very cuddly and harmless to someone in the UK where you have long since exterminated all of your large native predators and have nothing to fear in the wild. In many areas of the US, this is not the case. There is absolutely nothing in the world that is more effective against a pack of coyotes that are stalking your dog (they kill dogs as a territorial thing) than shooting them dead. Sounds horrible, but you aren't the one who is facing a very real threat.
(Zupper, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 17:59, closed)

The car comparison is actually not bad
The more I think about the car comparison, I think it's apt in the sense that it illustrates something about human behavior and what can really be relied on.

A car could so easily kill a lot of people. Someone could steer it straight into a crowd and kill a dozen in one stroke. This does in fact happen sometimes. People occasionally get road rage and essentially use the car as a weapon against another driver. Or they're just bonkers.

But isn't it something of a miracle how you can stand there and look at cars driving down a busy road all day long, with a sidewalk full of pedestrians, and odds are that not one of those cars will kill any of those people walking only a few steps away from huge machines going 55 mph. The vast majority of people seem to be remarkably sane and responsible with these very dangerous tools.

So it is with firearms. Here in my home state of Virginia, there are over 30,000 people with special permits to carry concealed weapons. They are walking around with handguns every day. And yet it's been years since anybody with one of those permits committed a crime with their weapon. Each year millions of firearms are sold in the US and only a tiny fraction of them will ever be used to commit a crime or harm any person. Most people can apparently be trusted not to lose their shit and point either the car or the gun at another person.

It is true that most firearms are designed to put a hole through a living thing and injure or kill it. Not all - many are designed specifically for target shooting purposes. It's an Olympic sport, don't forget. But if having the theoretical ability to cause serious harm to another living thing should be illegal, then how about teaching martial arts? We all generally accept that the ability of innocent people to defend themselves against threats to their safety is legitimate. Thus this idea about guns having no 'legitimate' purpose is a canard.

Then there is hunting for food, which is the next best thing, ethically speaking, to being a vegetarian. Just because you may live in an urban area where 'the grownups' provide all of your food pre-packaged for you doesn't mean that this is the reality for the rest of the world. The UK differs from the US in this respect because you have exterminated most of your native wildlife long ago and what is left is mostly quite scarce. But in America, our white tailed deer, elk and pronghorn antelope have booming populations. There is free non-endangered food running around everywhere and if you live some place where hunting is practical then you'd be a fool not to start eating it.

With beef averaging about $7 a pound and a typical yield of 50 pounds of meat per deer, the value of one deer is $350 in grocery cash that is then freed up for other things. My cost: one cartridge from my thirty ought six. About seventy five cents. The 6 deer that I shot in my backyard last season, butchered and put in the freezer are thus worth about $2,100.

Result.
(Zupper, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 18:19, closed)

"A neutered nation"
It's the attitude that without the right to own a machine exclusively designed with purposes of killing things you are "neutered" or less of a man that makes you come across as a total cunt.

It's such a pathetic viewpoint I can't be arsed to even consider the rest of your arguments regardless of what validity they may have.
(Bazongaloid, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 20:49, closed)

simpletons like zupper are the reason we have cunts like george bush
the problem is they cant distinguish between the concept that a hunting rifle in the hands of a hunter is fine

but handguns have no place in society
( spimf ™ is whoever you want him to be, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 21:12, closed)

^^What they said
Zupper, you are a douche.
(jabboy, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 22:55, closed)

The car analogy
...is flawed due to the cost/benefit calculation.

Vehicles: Cost - you might accidentally kill someone. Benefit - millions of people get to work, the park, museums, get their food delivered, get their kids bussed to school, every day.

Handguns: Cost - you might accidentally kill someone. Benefit - er... umm... they're cool?
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Sat 2 Aug 2008, 0:08, closed)

meh
funny thing is i can understand people who take a gun and kill the people in their school or workplace or whatever,
alot of people make everyone elses lives a lower quality via bullying and although you may say;
oh that doesn't mean that they don't have the right to live, it is my experience that their kids will be worse than they are due to the concentration effect of darwins rule.
the problem is that when i wos in the poor kids school near where i live, cos im poor, i solved people bullying with my fists, had over 300 fights and never lost one and also never started one, the bullies got neutralised and never fucked with innocents again and i can bet that they told their kids about not bullying incase the quite bookworm breaks their skull open against the safety bar but at least the buck stopped there.
the kids who get bullied and ostracised mercilessly but non-violently in the rich school that i was smart enough to go to after the poor school needed profesional help after that school simply because they were told not to fight back and i understand how much easier it would have been to take a gun and choose who deserved to live and who deserved to die because the odds are;
they would have been right

btw yeah it sounds fucked up but if your real honest about it and also dealt with wankers at school you would agree with me without fail

i know all this is a lil' bit off topic but trying to explain what all the therapists call;
the phenomonon of generation Y
we have no identity because we are told not to fight
if you think im a freak then this was a joke, or was it.
edit-wrote this when drunk, high etc.
(WilsonAlmighty, Sat 2 Aug 2008, 3:34, closed)

@Zupper
So only a tiny fraction of people are killed each year by guns, well that makes it ok then.

I wonder if it would be still be ok if one of those people classed as a tiny fraction was a relative of yours.
( girlinthehole, Sat 2 Aug 2008, 14:47, closed)

@BGB
he'd be absolutely cool with it, because at least that relative didn't die in a neutered nation.

Anyway, it wouldn't have been a licensed gun that killed his relatives, it would have been one owned by a darkie unlicensed gun owner.

edit - I'm not even gonna give wilsons post the benefit of a comment.
(Bazongaloid, Sat 2 Aug 2008, 16:43, closed)

ouch
sorry...
( Azathoth thinks my name isn't so bad..., Sat 2 Aug 2008, 23:14, closed)

legless
theres not really any practical way gun control can be made any tighter in the UK without a total ban on all firearms. and banning all legally held pistols has completely stopped gun crime hasnt it?
(tjn whizzing on the electric fence of life, Sun 3 Aug 2008, 17:25, closed)

@tjn
Well yes, as a matter of fact, if you compare our country (where handguns are illegal) and the US (where they aren't), you might notice something rather shocking - when they're harder to get hold of, there's a tendency for less people get killed by them.

:O

Douche.
(jabboy, Sun 3 Aug 2008, 20:20, closed)

I doubt there will ever be a solution...
The problem with gun controls are the people the impact.

It is all very well limiting what law abiding citizens carry, but the vast majority of the people willing to use a gun in a crime are the people who had no intention of following th elaws anyway, and can still find a way of getting hold of a gun on the black market.
On the other hand the law abiding citizen like the person who shoots targets (such as the disabled people above) or the farmer who has a gun for the protection of livestock from foxes (which is a real problem in some areas) are the ones that now find a wealth of laws getting in the way of their chosen hobby or legal use...
(442, Mon 4 Aug 2008, 12:47, closed)

Weaponry.
The argument for guns is a little like the knives over here in the UK, if you're a nutter who's going to stab/shoot/slash somebody up, you're going to do it no matter what the weapon.
(ice9, Tue 5 Aug 2008, 9:49, closed)