EVEN before the bodies of those shot last Wednesday were cold, a spokesperson for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation said we should not ban shotguns as we will never be able to hold the Olympic Games here again and that they are the tools of the trade for countryside people.

I can still remember the case of Peter O'Hare, a shooting enthusiast from Corfe, Somerset, who in September 2002 shot dead his lover Kaeren Hamar, 37, and her six-year-old daughter, Tori, a few miles from my home town, so this type of incident is rare but not, as the gun lobby would like us to believe, so rare that we cannot and should not legislate for them.

The election of Simon Hart, previously chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, as a Conservative MP could herald a chance to push forward the Countryside Alliance manifesto of countryside pursuits, which includes shooting wildlife, as a grant-eligible sport.

Mr Hart helped make the alliance the most effective pressure group of recent years and it has its own rural agenda, including developing 'country pursuits' through sports grants and educational inclusion.

One of my great concerns about this rural manifesto is the way that education establishments are targeted to bring children into contact with the countryside and related countryside pursuits. Teaching them how hounds are trained and managed for hunting and the promotion of shooting in the countryside seems a step backwards in child development.

I have no problems with clay or target shooting, but introducing children to shooting opens up the whole shooting scene for them and the debate as to what can be shot and where goes on to create the demand for live targets.

The proliferation of both legal and illegal firearms causes problems and I would like to think there is a sea change that finds breeding wildlife purely for the pleasure of the shooting enthusiast to kill immoral.

This would greatly reduce the amount of firearms in circulation.

As a footnote, the British Olympic team at Beijing failed to win a single medal, so I think we can live without this sport.

Graham Forsyth

Chard