Reflections of a stormy petrel

Well, hundreds of thousands of continental Europeans in each country - I know best about Italians, of course - also go hunting. There is a deep town/country divide on the matter, but it is not primarily about the use of guns, but about the scarcity of game: urban Greens feel that there is little left to shoot in places like Italy and that there ought to at least be a moratorium on hunting birds. (Nobody, however, objects to the culls of Italy's rich and never decreasing population of wild boars.) You need a weapons license for hunting guns, although never having had any interest in such things, I do not know what the conditions are; I do know that they are pretty stringent. Britain has by far the most draconian - they have almost killed competitive sport target shooting - passed in something of a panic after two frightful massacres in Hungerford, England (fourteen dead) and Dunblane, Scotland (ten dead children and one teacher) carried out by misfits with assault rifles.