One incident means a ban.

A Labour thug/MP is in trouble for fighting in a bar at Wastemonster. On the basis of that incident, all bars in Wastemonster should be closed and all Labour MPs banned.

An independent MEP has been accused of fiddling expenses (no, really? I hear you say) and so all expenses should be banned for all politicians no matter whether they are justified or not.

Ridiculous? Well, yes, in fact such a reaction would be insanely ridiculous.

And yet it is the normal reaction these days. Some yobbo shot a cat with an airgun and the response from the SSPCA (the Scottish version of the RSPCA) was -

Mike Flynn, the Scottish SPCA Chief Superintendent, said animals like cats are the ‘most common target’ of malicious airgun attacks.

He added: ‘This incident is another sickening example of a defenceless animal being injured as a result of airgun misuse and goes to highlight the need for a total ban on airguns in Scotland.’

Yes, one idiot takes a shot at a cat and so nobody in Scotland can own an airgun. According to the SSPCA, the only reason anyone buys an airgun is to shoot at cats.

I have an air rifle. It hasn’t been out of its case for about a decade and I don’t even know if it still works. What did I use it for? Paper targets, slugs and wasps. Slugs might get immune to little blue slug pellets but never to lead ones arriving at speed. And in my cruel, proto-serial-killer youth, I used to leave an empty but unwashed jam-jar out as bait for the wasps. I had a better gun in those days.

I have never even considered shooting at cats. I actually quite like cats. I like their ‘fuck you’ attitude and their absolute refusal to pay any attention to any rules of any kind whatsoever. And they kill mice. Having lived in the country for years, I learned to appreciate anything that could rid me of those troublesome mice.

Okay, what that shooter did to that cat makes him a git. There’s no getting away from that. I can scare cats away from shitting on my lawn without harming a hair on their chinny-chin-chins. They don’t bury it as the cat-lovers claim. They try, but on the lawn they can’t. I have stinky crystals that are effective and the local cats will be friends with me in the street but will run like hell if they see me in the back garden. They have learned, from my years of having a pond, that I am safe to approach outside the garden but scarier than a rabid Rottweiler inside the garden.

So yes, arrest and punish the evil sod who shot the cat, but ban all airguns? Really? The thugs will simply turn to crossbows and if memory serves, some gits already have shot cats with crossbows. Make it illegal? It already is illegal to hunt anything with any kind of bow anywhere in the UK. It’s even  technically illegal to kill slugs with a 50-lb recurve but…they eat tobacco so they really are asking for it, right?. Oh, I am risking a visit to the European Court of Mollusc Rights here. Five quid says there really is one, or the equivalent.

The only place it’s legal to kill anything with a bow and arrow is within York city walls on a Sunday, when you can kill an armed Scotsman in a kilt. It is not legal to use those bows on any other living thing at all.

Likewise, airguns. It is legal for me to fire my airgun in my garden as long as the pellet does not land outside my garden. Even if it’s a bounce, if it lands in Plastic Man’s garden he could (and probably would) call the police. It is not legal to shoot at a cat even if it’s in my garden. With anything.

Even so, my garden is not a public place.

Inspector Stewart Hurry, of Strathclyde Police, said: ‘These are cruel and dangerous actions by the person firing a weapon of this type in a public place.

Who shot that cat? Most likely it happened in someone’s garden. Someone who ‘had the right to be offended’ by the wandering nature of someone else’s cat. There is no evidence at all to suggest anyone fired anything in a public place. This is pure hype to push for a ban on airguns.

I wonder if the Gat counts? It doesn’t use compressed air. It uses a sprung barrel to throw a .177 pellet in roughly the direction it’s pointing. If I wanted to hurt anyone with a Gat I wouldn’t load it. The barrel can do far more damage than anything that comes out of it.

I have a couple of BB guns too. One looks like an AK-47 and I would never dare take that into any public place. Another is a fair copy of a Colt semi-automatic pistol. It struggles to penetrate paper at any range but again, being seen with it in public would get you shot.

When I was a child I knew that carrying a loaded airgun in public was illegal. I carried mine broken open when we went out to play and never shot at anyone who wasn’t in the game. That was in the seventies. Now it seems that the world believes that airguns are the tools of the new psychos. I hope they never come for me because death by airgun can take a long, long time. It didn’t even permanently damage the cat. I agree with the vet, by the way,  invasive surgery is likely to cause more damage than leaving the pellet in place.

There is a mad rush now to utterly disarm the population. Scare stories about airguns, crossbows, even dogs. You can’t have them. They might hurt a burglar and you’ll be prosecuted.

It doesn’t matter. I need no weapons. I can scare the drones to death with a cigarette or a glass of whisky. They really are that weak now and they believe they will live forever if all of us horrible non-conformists are removed. In Panoptica, I have worked out how to make that a reality and it actually disturbs me to see how easy it was.

So there will be a ban on airguns in Scotland, for the keeeteeens. Someone once offered to buy mine. You can have it for postage. I don’t use it anyway and by the time the idiot politicians are finished, I’ll risk five years inside just for having it rusting in my wardrobe.

I am keeping the Gat. I still have slugs to deal with.

Until the SSPCS get fired up…