ANOTHER VOICE
When the risk of lions is less than the nuisance of keeping a-hold of Nurse
AUBERON WAUGH
Last Saturday, out shooting in the Somerset countryside, I decided to carry out a spot check on the shotguns being used. My own, as I knew, was made by a London gunsmith, long since defunct, ab- out 60 years ago. Of the other guns, most were 60 to 80 years old; one — the best and grandest — was over 100 years old. Only one was post-war, and that was Spanish.
Various observations might arise from this: on the excellence of the craftsmanship which enables these beautiful old objects still to be in use after so long — how many machines made today will be in use after 15 years, let alone 80? Equally, one could remark on the comparative poverty of the English landed classes, that they can no longer afford to buy new shotguns; those being made to the old standards are now prohibitively expensive for all except Arab oilmen and a handful of Americans. Final- ly, we might congratulate ourselves on how these guns have been handed down over the generations in good working order without too much interference from a bossy, insecure and increasingly paranoid government.
At the time of the Hungerford massacre I warned that elements in the police force, Home Office and what one might call the Currie-Fookes faction in the Conservative Party would use the occasion to agitate against the private ownership and use of shotguns. At the moment of writing, I have no idea what line, if any, the fiend Currie or the cow Fookes takes on the vexed question of shotgun licences, nor have I any great curiosity to know. I use these two names to sum up that aspect of modern Conservatism which seeks to boss us all around — the nanny state where Nanny, far from being the gentle, indulgent, feck- less old thing of Labour dreams, is a ferocious virago of Tory nightmares — ever anxious to dip our thumbs in gall to prevent us sucking them, to tie our left hands behind our backs if we are left- handed, to rack us if we are short and to cut our fingers off if we look as if we might be going to masturbate.
In Somerset it was once widely believed that witches came out to milk the cows after dark, which explained why they gave less milk in winter. Keeping a weather eye open for these secret, black and midnight hags who, I felt sure, would be creeping out to milk the Hungerford massacre, I gave little thought to the genial, bucolic figure of Douglas Hurd, the Home Secret- ary. Nanny Hurd, as we must now call him, should have been above suspicion. His father, Sir Anthony Hurd, was well known to us all as a farmer in Wiltshire, MP in Newbury and, better still, farm editor of The Field. Even young Douglas, damn it all, went to Eton before joining the Fore- ign Office. Eton may produce socialists, even communist agents, but it does not produce opponents of blood sports or people who wish to control the ownership and use of shotguns by fellow Etonians.
Nor is Nanny Hurd a fool. It was obvious, after Hungerford, that power- maniacs in the Home Office would try to confuse the quasi-military equipment used by Rambo-freaks like the mass murderer Ryan with the ordinary double-barrelled 12-bore shotguns which have always been used by country-dwellers to'blast away at rabbits, pigeons, pheasants and occasional- ly (when drunk) chickens. Hurd may have given up all ties with the country since his father's death — he lists his recreation as 'thriller-writing', which is scarcely a heal- thy occupation for a Home Secretary — but he knows perfectly well that shotguns have nothing whatever to do with semi- automatic or automatic rifles. Criminals may occasionally use a shotgun in further- ance of crime, just as they may use a stocking to cover their faces or a kitchen knife to carve up their wives. But whereas semi-automatic and automatic rifles have no sane or useful purpose to balance their anti-social potentialities, shotguns (like stockings and kitchen knives) have a clear and beneficial function.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for him to ban the ownership of semi- automatic rifles. To extend the control to pump-action shotguns would have been officious, but I, for one, would not have complained very much. They are ugly things, compared to the ordinary double- barrelled shotgun, and don't give the bird much of a chance. But what Mr Hurd proposes goes beyond all this. Not only will shotgun owners have to carry an identification card, with photo- graph, but they must also submit serial numbers of all weapons owned, 'thus enabling police to keep an accurate record of gun users'. These suggestions are as half-baked as they are oppressive. Many shotguns in use have no serial numbers at all; those that do refer only to the old stocklists of gunsmiths, many of them now defunct. For a policeman to copy out these meaningless numbers and feed them into a computer would achieve nothing but a massive waste of police time, which should be spent catching criminals.
The proposal that owners of shotguns should carry identity cards is even more fatuous and time-wasting. Who is going to ask a criminal with a stocking over his face at the bank till for his identification pap- ers? It is a fantasy to suppose that any amount of harassment of respectable citizens will prevent a criminal from acquir- ing a shotgun and cartridges, if he wants them. Nanny Hurd will simply have given us another useless document to lose — and made a nuisance of himself.
Perhaps that is the idea — to impress upon us that from now on Englishmen can possess shotguns only by gracious permis- sion of the Home Secretary (who happens to be Douglas R. Hurd). If Nanny Hurd cannot resist these power fantasies, what chance have we with obvious madwomen like Edwina Currie, and her fantasies of stopping us all smoking?
Belloc's famous advice, addressed to Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion, was that we should . . . always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
The wisdom of this depends on quite how awful Nurse is. If Jim found Nurse nibbling his fingers, he would be well advised to run away and risk meeting a lion. There are not very many lions around, after all. I hope I do not need a Mori poll to convince Nanny Hurd that 85 per cent of shotgun owners are Conserva- tive voters, 60 per cent are members of the Conservative Party. If he persists in sing- ling us out for the exercise of his power fantasies, I will try to persuade them to cut their subscriptions from pounds to pennies. If that does not work we will simply have to resign from the Conservative Party and vote for Dr Owen. Hurd may have forgot- ten his roots, but we haven't.
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