UK: Town mayor bans 400-year-old gun firing tradition because it might scare children

Telegraph.uk ^ | 28 Nov 2008 | Richard Savill

[KarlInOhio]

Can they still say bang when pointing their mustkets, just so long as they do it in an inside voice?

He added: "Being told we cannot do it because it might scare children is very sad and almost a bit daft....

almost a bit -> completely bloody

[VRWCmember]

I’m just impressed they could get a 400 year old gun to fire in the first place. Is is ok to fire younger guns?

[5thGenTexan]

If they think those guns will scare the children, wait until the IEDs start going off in the UK...

[70th Division]

Want to really scare the children. Take them to the Muslim part of your country. You know the place where the police do not even go.

[an amused spectator]

Sounds like a case for 400 years worth of reparations to traumatized children to me...

[Red_Devil 232]

The guns going off and the smoke are probably the only reason the kids want to go to the thing!

[pandoraou812]

I agree with you & if this custom has been done for 400 yrs & the past children have be fine with it, why the ban now?

[KarlInOhio]

I’d be even more impressed with a 400 year old tradition of turning on the lights. Keeping it up for the first 270 years without electricity and pointlessly flipping a switch goes beyond persistence to pigheadedness.

[Joe 6-pack]

As miserable a lib as Stephen King may be, one of the themes that runs through his Dark Tower series is how a once great civilization fell to the forces of darkness when people "forgot the faces of their fathers."

Wrong as he may be on many things, King was dead on on with his musings in this area.

File under "stopped clock" or "blind pig."

[chainsaw]

I wonder what the children thought when the Germans launched V-1 and V-2 bombs at London during WWII. Those things made a great big boom.

Over the 400 years and countless generations, how many were truly scared when the little guns went pop?

[bitterohiogunclinger]

“Keeping it up for the first 270 years without electricity and pointlessly flipping a switch goes beyond persistence to pigheadedness.”
They probably needed those 270 years to get the children prepared so they wouldn’t be startled.

[Does so]

"...The council said the noise of the blank shots would be too loud for children..."

This is clearly not the generation of council members who were "coast listeners"—those who listened for the sounds of Luftwaffe bombers approaching Britain.

That sound would be far more fearful than blanks at a prescribed time.

[MNDude]

wussification of western civilization ping

[Joe Bfstplk]

The U.S. does not have the exclusive on stupidity.

[Tommyjo]

IEDs were going off for decades in the UK. Something, sadly, that the UK populace is very well aware of. Certain mis-guided elements of the U.S. populace provided money to finance those terrorists.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

My British expat wife is gonna love this :-)

[Mazeman]

Oh Lord....

What has happened to that once great country? Why do they want to continue to relinquish their tradition?

The children better get used to clitorectomies.

[WaterBoard]

City council to milita - Today’s children are retarded compared to children 400 years ago.

[Flavius]

Morons