Hi ho, Silver, away

So whats new. As you may have noticed I have been a little bit preoccupied over the past week and have neglected my blog. Why is that you ask? Well it seems that I have been promoted at work (in my absence) and now I have more work to do, so my blogging time is limited and has been for the past week or so as I have had to ‘hit the floor running’ as they say to catch up on the new things that I should be doing.

Now I say ‘new’ things that I should be doing, but if we apply that old saw ‘what goes around comes around’ to the work I am now doing, having been ‘promoted’ we would find that I am now doing exactly the same as what I was doing 6 years ago when they first employed me! i.e. both the quantitative and the qualitative research. But the managers, in their wisdom, after a while saw fit to employ others to do the quant work and it drifted away from me to such an extent that this past two years the work had been subbed out to a contractor.

So hey ho, I asked for extra responsibility (as the only way to be up-graded) and they gave me back my original job, but with a new title, so that’s OK then.

You will have noticed below how manly I was on my holidays, playing with guns and shooting stuff, well isn’t it spooky how synchronicity happens, because I had not shot a gun for many a year, not even at the fair, until visiting Ukraine this summer and found myself blasting away with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov and then this Bank Holiday weekend I find myself on a range at a gun club blasting away at targets once more.

How did this happen is even stranger, at a loose end on Saturday as my wife was meeting with the local coven of Ukrainian Wives here in sunny Plymouth, I visited some old friends, who unbeknownst to me, even though I had known them for years were members of a gun club and when I arrived Dave was cleaning his 4 rifles as a prelude to the next days open day at the range. Consequently I was invited and had quite a fun time blasting various paper targets with various weapons.

Now I know you think firearms are banned in this country but the stupid thing about this law is that while you cannot own a handgun, you can own as many rifles as you want including Kalashnikovs (single shot). How ridiculous is that?

Now I know that shooting is a sport and I know that we were firing at paper targets but why is it that when you wander down the range to look at your group, if its nice and tight (like mine were!) people start commenting about how the good shooting equates to ‘well he’d be dead then’ or ‘yep nice group, right in the middle of the chest’ as if the targets were somehow substitutes for some unknown assailant that I wanted to take out.

I was only trying to get the shot close to the centre of the target that’s where my head was at, not virtually trying to take someone out. I think it comes down to that old question, do guns kill people, or is it the people who hold the guns that kill people? I personally think it’s the people who pull the triggers that kill people, guns are just inanimate objects, machines that can only work with a person present.

Oh and I would be really interested to hear the American point of view here.

O I’m not a gun nut and I don’t think I’ll ever be, but there is something quite satisfying in the big bangs they make, and in using a Winchester rifle, like what the cowboys used to in all those cowboy and indian films.

"Hi ho, Silver, away!"