In only 12 years you have completely internalized a piece of knee-jerk legislation as an intrinsic attribute of Britishness.[ Parent ]
I'd have been 18, then. And I already thought people who were interested in pistols were weird.
More relevantly, though, the sale and use of pistols in the UK was to a very, very small niche. It never had pretensions of mass market appeal, unlike the sale of weapons in the US, which leads to this type of consumer type information. It's that which I find weird.
But I suspect if, say, they banned basketball after some kind of gangsta-rap scare, in a few years time you'd regard its practioners as similarly un-British.[ Parent ]
I don't have any figures, and, as I said, part of it may have been my age at the time.
And I already think of basketball players as un-British...
A better example may be this idea of banning 'samurai' swords, which is likely to capture some of teh historical re-enactment crowd. That is a bunch of people I think of as being weird, but also as representing a rather British eccentricity.
