Under Boris Johnson’s Olympic ticket giveaway scheme, 125,000 tickets will be given away to London schoolchildren. However, they will not include tickets to the shooting events as some have said it would ‘glorify guns’.
Participants in the sport, however, say this would be an opportunity to see guns and shooting in a different way. Rather than associating them with crime, it would be an opportunity to associate them with training, responsibility and hard work. David Penn, the secretary of the British Shooting Sports Council, said of the plan, “There is no link between Olympic-level shooting and crime. Its like saying that a thief would use a Formula One car as a getaway car.”
Yet again, the nanny state feels the need to rear its ugly head. Despite using this opportunity for children to see how professionals treat their weapons, how they train, proper safety protocol and showing children that they are not toys, Boris and his supporters of this scheme would rather come to ridiculous conclusions that sporting guns would encourage violence. On that logic, they should also withhold fencing as it encourages waving pointy objects, or wresting because it encourages fighting.
This is an outrageous slight to the hard-working Olympic athletes all so that some London politicians can promote their own anti-gun agendas. Will the nanny state go so far that it is willing to put aside the well-being of athletes and all the work they have put into their training? I’m, sadly, not shocked that they’ve taken this approach, and its depressing that there really are no limits to the nanny state mentality.
http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2011/08/children-to-be-banned-from-olympic-shooting-events.html
