The increase in numbers of those holding shotgun certificates is heartening; more heartening still was the absence of any adverse comment in the media when this news was announced in June. In past times, certain sections of the press would have greeted the revelation with lurid headlines and some inaccurate, but suitably sensationalist, guff. Also, hardly commented upon was the news that 3,500 or so of the 575,000 certificate holders are young people under the age of 18. Apart from The Guardian which reported that: “Thousands of under 18s own shotguns” before going on to present a largely sober and bias free article, the story was more or less ignored. Of course this would change were there to be a serious incident involving a young person and a legally owned firearm. It is safe to predict that in the wake of a death or serious injury the whole question of gun ownership would be subject to close scrutiny and public debate.
This is perhaps understandable but, given what follows, it is also indicative of the distorted priorities of both the media and the public. In attempting to find out exactly how many serious incidents involving young shooters there had been in the past five years (none) we came across this: “Drivers aged 17-19 only make up 1.5% of UK licence holders, but are involved in 9% of fatal and serious crashes where they are the driver”. These figures do not distinguish between the numbers of fatalities and those accidents involving serious injury, but looking at 2015, the total for both groups was 21,248. Given that in 2015 45.5 million people held a driving licence* it is possible to say that 68,250 of them were age 19 or under. From this one may conclude that one in every 35 drivers under 19 is likely to be involved in an accident resulting in death or serious injury to another road user, pedestrian or themselves. Were young shotgun users as poor at shooting as this group evidently is at driving, the outcome would be that we would see approximately 100 shooting incidents a year involving death or serious injury.
Odd isn’t it, that a death involving a group of young shooters would certainly bring about much media wailing and breast beating, inevitably followed by calls for a ban, when the carnage being wrought week in week out by inexperienced drivers attracts so little attention, nor calls for changes in the law.
*Of course not all licence holders will be currently driving.