I just wish that lovely warm, flat British ale were more available here. I have yet to find an American craft beer that comes close, and even Bass and Newkie Broon are getting harder to find. A while ago I found Newcastle brewed by Heineken in the Netherlands, nowhere close to the real thing, and more recently brewed by Lagunitas in California, downright vile. Oh, for a proper pint of McEwan's.
"Digweed is British, the end" but he shoots an Italian Perazzi.
The presenter uses the word "hunting" when it is actually shooting. British guns are probably best for "shooting" where the process is static. "Guns" (not hunters) are placed at pegs (another term indicative of the static nature of shooting). When moving from drive to drive guns are cosseted in slips and after the season they need a maker's once over.
Du Broff in an old Gun Digest article on the British shooting scene wrote that if there is any desire in a Briton to actively seek game by moving over land, this desire is quickly stamped out. In other words there is no true hunting in Britain, and is no wonder that the term hunting, when used over there refers to mounted fox hunting. For more on the difference between hunting and how it morphed into shooting see here:
Subjected to true hunting conditions these so called "best guns" will not last long. Try if you dare to drag a "best" over chukar terrain and see how well it lasts.
As for artistic merit, the assumption is that the British makers produced the most aesthetically pleasing guns. True if your aesthetic sense tends to Art Nouveau, a period that coincided with the development of the British gun used for static shooting.
There are other artistic trends. Arte Deco arguably produced a more modern and artistically more honest approach since it applied the "form follows function" principle in earnest. For more on this see here:
Setting the criteria and then delivering judgement is a well known debating trick used by the video presenter. Asserting that British wing shooting is the best in the world is that criterion, and naturally a British gun is best for that activity. But British wing shooting is not hunting. There is no British hunting over public land, in other words none for the common folk.
And that brings us to what we want be seen as and who we want to identified with. I am OK with the image of the farm kid dragging a Stevens 620, or a Winchester single shot while kicking rabbits out of a bush and carrying whatever I harvest by myself home to cook, rather than the lord who downs hundreds of birds in one day's shooting, touches none of them since there are pickers up for that mundane task, and certainly never cooks anything he shoots. The thought of being identified with such barbarity makes me cringe.
Well that's news to me. I shot a free range Fallow, muntjac, and Chinese Water deer as well as walked up Ducks and Pheasant. I did pay a small trespass fee but that is common in America as well.
I have been dragging my best gun across our high prairies in search of Roosters and grouse for about fifteen years and I see absolutely no ill effects from hunting that gun.
You will be hard pressed to find a bigger smile on face then when I roll a cagey wild bird over my dogs with that old Holland. Despite what all the nah sayers constantly spout, in the years I have owned that gun it has needed zero maintenance beyond cleaning and lube.
SKB, I lived in England for 14 years, started my "shooting" career there. I left when the police refused to renew my shotgun certificate because I could not produce a written agreement showing that I had the shooting rights over some piece of private land. Public land did not count as no shooting is allowed there.
The certificate having lapsed, due to their delay, I was told that if I moved the guns out of the house to a shop to sell I would be arrested for illegal possession. A "kind" police sergeant agreed to buy my guns. We agreed on a price, he picked them and handed me a folded check. I did not look at it, he was a trustworthy police officer. The check was for a lot less than we agreed.
We each have our experiences in life. Mine lead me to smile when I read a comment attributed to Bob Brister "if you have not been diddled by an Englishman, you haven't lived"
I deal a lot with the British as I import quite a few guns from them. In my experience they are no more or less honest than Americans, gentlemen as well as thieves are where you find them. I will say though that customer service and communication in Britain leaves quite a bit to be desired. In America, if you inquire about purchasing something or hiring someone to provide a service you will receive a prompt reply the vast majority of the time, the same cannot be said of Britain.
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