[quote=SKB][quote=Ted Schefelbein]
Did you drag your best gun to Olde Blighty to shoot the deer? Did you do this last year? Will you do it again, this year, or, next? Why not? 20 years ago, I inquired about doing some hunting in France. My hosts, gracious, but honest, informed me that while it might not be technically illegal, it might as well be. As gunmakers, they had to score an invite from a landowner, and they would have a day out, surrounded by strangers, and they might get a shot at a duck, or not. The event usually ended as a party, and the guest of honor was most often a large boar that had been hit by a car, or shot on a hunt, but, usually, hit by a car. The pigs were a huge nuisance in that part of France, and getting worse. There were fees, of course, but, those fees promised them nothing, save they would be on the property that day.
They considered themselves lucky if they got out every five years. They were well connected, opposed to say, mostly anyone else. I was dumbfounded at how few options there were to this, and how they expected to produce hunting weapons in a culture that had almost no legal public hunting available to the masses.
As long as you have a pile of money to give them, them being the landowners, local enforcement agencies, and whatever government perfunctory is standing with his hand out, you are right, you can technically hunt, in Europe. Sometimes. What we have, here, is hugely different. The situation in Europe is most certainly not improving.
Good guns are much like gentlemen. Where you find them. Already pointed out, the good gun that is walked up to a peg in a slip, might not be all that great sitting in a duck boat for 40 seasons. Yes, I know guys that do that with a gun, and it is not an English gun.
Best,
Ted
Ted, I've dragged a shotgun to Scotland several times to shoot driven birds. Also have done a few walk up days. The place where we shoot takes care of the necessary paperwork with the local police and sends me my certificate. One year, I took a Merkel sidelock. I forgot to specify, when I provided the information for my certificate, that the gun was a sxs and not an OU. So my certificate was incorrect. The driver waiting to collect us at the airport had the corrected version. But the young Scottish woman who asked me to open my case didn't notice the discrepancy.
I haven't gone now for 3 or 4 years. But I went on an annual basis for several years. And in spite of having completed the necessary paperwork with US Customs, I was held up every time by Customs on my return from the UK. The last go round, a Customs officer told me that he saw they'd run me through the process repeatedly, and said he'd make sure it didn't happen again. Haven't gone since, so I'm not sure whether the problem has been corrected. But never the slightest problem on the UK end.
