Holl, I know that you've done your homework, visited a gun shop, fannied around with some bullets....but have you tried to aim and shoot the gun in question? Bearing in mind that Sheila had never handled that gun before? I've said before that BT has the exact same gun (he has many guns), he gave me a go to shoot at the magpies that raid the swallow nests in the stables. He might as well have given me a giant parsnip. It's not a big gun, but it's heavy, unbalanced and unwieldy, by the time I'd got it into position the magpies had died of old age.
Whoever shot the Bamber family had used a gun before.... they obviously underestimated the power of it, but they could hold it steady, point it, fire it and...most importantly, reload it.
The purpose of the visit to the gun shop was just to check out the cartridges. Back to our friend Fletcher, he said when he loaded them they produced a black discolouration to his hands and had a greasy feel. This contradicted the manufactures key features doc so I decided to check them out for myself and found:
- loading the cartridges into the mag was easier than replacing a battery into a tv remote. There was nothing remotely difficult about the task. It's intuitive and only possible to load them the correct way. IMO even a complete novice to the task would have to suffer severe learning difficulties to find any difficulty.
- my hands were perfectly clean to the naked eye. There was no discolouration or greasy feel or odour.
You may recall Myster suggested maybe the manufactures changed the way they were made. I emailed Eley and was told no changes.
The only firearm I've ever fired was my brother's air rifle. He set up some targets in the garden for us to shoot. I don't recall thinking it was heavy or unwieldy and I'm pretty small fully grown: 5' 3.5" 8st 7llbs. I just kept thinking what if it backfires! Most of the top female golfers in the world are from SE Asia ie petite and boy can they hit the ball!
The rifle is the exact same length as my golf clubs. I looked up the weight of the Anshutz (I'll check it again next week as I can't recall the exact figs now) but it isn't heavy in relation to other objects SC must have handled including the twins. SC was a single mother living in London and relying on her own steam to get out and about. She was used to carrying and handling childcare paraphernalia eg twin buggy, heavy shopping: food, drink, house cleaning, toiletries and of course lifting and carrying the twins.
If you consider other mass shootings involving family members in private dwellings eg Bain and Defeo the perps were experienced with firearms and shot more adults with similar low powered firearms to the rifle used at WHF using far fewer cartridges. The soc at WHF was IMO compatible with an inexperienced shooter. Of course the counter argument to this is that JB went for overkill to make it appear amateurish and frenzied.
