Its a strange choice of gun to go rabbiting with,its usually a twelve bore.
Excerpts courtesy of Gunfire Graffiti - THE WHITE HOUSE FARM MURDERS – BAMBER or CAFFELL January 11, 2020
‘Sheila Caffell never voiced or displayed any interest in firearms or shooting. If she had and if only to fulfil a plan to kill her family maintaining a secret shooting pursuit in the UK would have been extremely difficult. There was certainly evidence that Sheila Caffell had a rudimentary experience of firing a shotgun but that does not qualify someone to purposefully and individually operate it or any other firearm. It has also been implied that because she was brought up in a rural farming family, she would learn how to handle firearms. That is a very common, urban inspired myth and likened to supposing a Merchant Sea Captain’s daughter is skilled at deep sea fishing and tying knots. Sheila Caffell would have needed to have been able to do the following, quickly and confidentially.
Magazine charging / Loading / Making ready
Unless she had acquired extra magazines, (which were never found), she would have to be able to charge a single magazine 3 times with a total of 25 x .22 bullets. Load the rifle, (attach the charged magazine into the magazine housing). Make ready, (withdraw the cocking handle to the rear and let it go – the bolt assembly flies forward under spring tension and picks the top round off the magazine and feeds it into the breech. This also cocks the internal hammer. The process of making a semi-auto rifle ready, (loaded and cocked to fire), is not natural, it takes practise. The natural inclination of the inexperienced shooter is to keep hold of the cocking handle and guide it forward. This will generally fail to pick up a round and will result in a misfeed. The analogy here is when we learn to allow an open car bonnet to drop the last couple of feet to enable it to lock. It’s not natural…but we only learn after we are initially shown.
Placing fired rounds with no hesitation or mercy
She was able to remove the safety and then very confidently bring the weapon to bear, (this is where removing the scope was so important). Firing and placing rounds into shouting, flailing, pleading human frames at close range would require some cold composure; despite being a schizophrenic, physically weak and uncoordinated. Her proprioceptive skills and co-ordination here was truly remarkable, she found her target on every attempt, not one round missed.
Sheila Caffell’s suicide or murder
She then returned to her parent’s bedroom, laid down turned the rifle around and shot herself in the throat, planning to discharge a bullet through her palate and into her brain. She failed but despite the shock and pain of that attempt she managed to realign the weapon again and on the second attempt successfully killed herself. She had accounted for her rounds perfectly and had had a single round left for her own departure but when she failed to kill herself she reloaded the rifle having conveniently access to one further round and finished the job. So with all this in mind she had been able to count her rounds in the most peculiar circumstances. Now having killed herself she had even left the weapon “safe”; no rounds in the chamber or magazine. She didn’t even take her own life in her son’s bedroom as her ex husband Colin Caffell had pointed out and insisted she would have done if she had ever resorted to something so diabolical.
Counting rounds, being acutely aware of ammunition expenditure, timing reloads etc are drills practised by the military and armed police. In the heat of a live murderous shooting, this slightly built, physically weakened schizophrenic became a hideous Lara Croft; she was remarkable.
http://gunfire-graffiti.co.uk/the-white-house-farm-murders-caffel-or-bamber/