It isn't 1997 anymore

General Gun Chat
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I was at the range today getting a shoot in, and one of the other people there had one of the newer lever-release shotguns and was having a jolly good time testing it out by mag-dumping it (which is not against the range rules).

I paid little attention to it - he was having fun and wasn’t being obnoxious, and shooting is supposed to be fun - but when I’d finished and was outside having a chat to the RO about some club stuff, this guy who was well past retirement age comes up and starts going on about how someone is shooting a semi-auto shotgun on the range, and is that allowed?

The RO is all “It’s a lever-release and yes, it’s fine” and this old guy is still “But it sounds like a semi-auto” and the RO is saying “Well, it’s not a semi-auto shotgun, so it’s OK”, which is clearly not the response this guy wanted.

He then starts asking what a lever-release is and where they came from - and then he starts going on about how John Howard made him hand in his semi-auto shotgun in 1997, and talking about it, and utterly failing to notice that everyone else’s eyes are glazing over because no-one is that interested in hearing about your old self-loading shotgun and also it was 30 years ago so it’s time to move on.

Anyway, I thought the episode was an interesting reminder that there are shooters out there who absolutely are not keeping up with any developments in the firearms tech field or any of the gun law stuff that’s been going on for the past decade or so.

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They’re definitely out there, and they’ll often hate on anything that they don’t now about or that doesn’t fit their shooting discipline. Bloody Fudds.

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Can happen to every man if you are not careful.

A lot of guys fall into the trap of picking a decade/era and anything after that is automatically shit.

Haircuts, music, cars , guns, you name it.

Actually one of my pet hates.

Stay open minded

By the way, the internet in its mainstream form has been around 30 or so years, so we can stop carrying on like that’s a new thing too.

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All too true! :clap::clap::clap:

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I had the opposite earlier this year.
Took my now old AF straight pulls to the pistol club, but this old bloke couldn’t believe I could have that. Difference was he was stoked and went and bought something new and rapid fire once he knew that he could.

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Silly old c@nt…Just bitter he had to hand his in. I feel his pain, but get the sand out, you silly old bastard. I dont yet own a LR but they are fun!

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Yep, some blokes still carry on as if Howard cut their left nut out. Get over it and move on…

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My thoughts exactly. There’s basically an entire generation of shooters now who were kids when the laws were changed, plus a generation after that who weren’t even born in 1996, with some of the youngest gun owners only having been born in 2007.

From their perspective, something from the 1990s might as well have happened during WWII given how long ago it was.

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You know its good to remember what that arsehole did to us though… not happening again and all that…