Boris Johnson Bans Poor Children From Watching Olympic Shooting: Etonians Can Fire At Will
THE Mascots were out in force at the Crystal Palace stadium in London to raise funds for the UK’s first Olympic sport based charity Gold Challenge. The idea is that you participate in an Olympic sport and whilst doing so raise money for charity. But not for the shooting events. Oh,.no. From the cause and effect school of thinking that says people who drive fast cars in video games will commit more road traffic accidents than those who don’t and that looking at images of kids in swimming gear will turn you into a paedophile, comes news that children are banned from watching shooting events at the London Olympics.
London schoolchildren can claim 125,000 subsidised Olympic tickets but are banned from watching the shooting.
The Evening Standard writes:
Giving children tickets to the events, at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, could have appeared at odds with Mayor Boris Johnson’s bid to quell teenage gun and knife crime.
Anyone not now banging their head into a wall or reaching for the gun, should hear a source opine:
“We decided it would not be appropriate. It’s the only sport children will not be able to go to as part of the Ticketshare scheme.”
Danny Bryan, founder of Communities Against Gun and Knife Crime, the acceptable response to the group Communities For Gun And Knife Crime, agrees:
“I agree with Boris. It is good kids should enjoy the Games but there’s no way we should glorify guns.”
That would be Boris Johnson, the old Etonian. His old school teaches shooting in the junior ranks. As its website boasts:
Shooting is a sport that has experienced a recent revival at Eton after a few decades of decline. There are two branches of the activity: the house shooting competitions which take place on weekday evenings and attract thirty boys a night, and the school shooting team…
The school shooting team is selected from the best shots in house shooting and has boys from every block in it, unusual for a school first team. This team of eight boys shoots in the small-bore shooting range during the Michaelmas and Lent Halves. The range is in the roof-space above the gymnasium where the CCF installed a range a few decades ago. Members of the VIII therefore represent the CCF.
In the summer the team heads off to Bisley ranges to shoot 7.62 full-bore rifles once a week and it enters the National Schools event at the end of the half. This event has some 600 participants and covers a week of shooting. 2005 is the third year that Eton has entered the competition after a gap of a decade. The competition used to be a speciality of Eton in the early 1900s when the school took the first prize on a regular basis.
So Bozza, being a responsible type (see here) is allowed to shoot and watch shots being fired but the poorer children are not. (Also, didn’t Boris’s school chum and illegal drug taking, law-abiding Tory colleagueDavid Cameron want all children to take part in the CCF? Answer: yes.)
Anorak wonders if other sports should also be banned or staged after dark, such as: fencing, wrestling, boxing, taekwondo and the modern pentathlon, a sport from hereon known as “rioting”.
And then ban all track and field events – you know, the one that scare the participants into running by firing a gun into the air like a Libyan rebel. Come the revolutions, eh, readers…
Posted: 2nd, September 2011 | In: Key Posts Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
