Livery lunches are held at the Proof House for members of the Company and their guests around 8 times a year. Before Champagne and a sumptuous lunch, guests have the opportunity to learn something of the Art and Mistery of proofing a firearm, with a workshop brief given by the Proof Master or Superintendent. The common interest of those present is of course shooting and those present on 21 March, were delighted to hear the Master’s guest, journalist Toby Young, speak. He was invited to make the Toast to the Company, but before doing so, treated those present to his thoughts:
.… Before giving the toast I just wanted to say a few words about driven shooting, a sport I’m sure many of us here are passionate about and one that, as the livery company of the gunmakers, you have a duty to defend since there won’t be a need to make any more guns if shooting is banned.
Make no mistake, the same political lobby who got fox-hunting banned have got shooting in their sites.
The League Against Cruel Sports has succeeded in getting pheasant shooting banned on public land in Wales. Thanks to a LACS petition which attracted 12,700 signatures, National Resources Wales has announced it won’t be renewing licenses to shoot pheasant from this month and will be reviewing the leasing of wildfowl shooting rights.
For those of you with short memories, hunting was banned in Scotland in 2002 and then in England and Wales three years later.
And a ban of driven shooting will be like a ratchet: once it’s been imposed it’s never going to be lifted. We’ve had three Conservative PMs since the fox hunting ban came into force and none of them have lifted it.
So we need to get out there and make the case for driven shooting.
And it a shouldn’t be that difficult.
According to a 2014 report commissioned by the Countryside Alliance, shooting contributes £2bn a year to the rural economy, providing full and part-time employment to 350,000 people.
Two million hectares of land are under active shoot management, accounting for 12{d75d5756df4d27bb7c06405cafa060057fd52a8ae2810007ffd499f5fbf5e8f1} of the UK’s rural land. That’s 10 tines the area encompasses by the country’s nature reserves and adds up to an awful lot of copses, hedgerows, headlands, wetlands, ponds and rivers — all lovingly maintained at no cost to the taxpayer.
Much of this land is heather moorland, which has all but disappeared on the Continent. The majority of the world’s heather moorland is in the U.K., thanks to the wisdom and fieldcraft of generations of gamekeepers.
The antis have succeeded in creating the impression that the shooting community is a danger to rare species, but, in fact, the opposite is the case.
By controlling for pests like foxes, crows, stoats and weasels, the keepers protect endangered ground-nesting birds, including black grouse, skylark, grey partridge, curlew and golden plover. Why isn’t the RSPB celebrating this conservation effort?
We should remind people that while shooting may be a sport, after game birds have been shot they’re loaded on to trailers and sent on a journey that often ends in a plate.
If we’re going to win this fight we need to enlist the help of Britain’s millions of shooting enthusiasts. Roughly four million people own air guns in the U.K. and around 1.6m of them shoot live quarry. We need to dispel the myth that shooting is a sport for billionaires and Tory toffs. Or just for men and not for women. It’s a sport that everyone can participate in and we should be doing our best to encourage even more people from all walks of life to take it up.
So to the barricades my friends! Let’s face down this mob and safeguard the sport we all love for the benefit of future generations.
The Gunmakers Company! May it flourish root and branch forever!