Shooter arrested, threatened, abused

Barry Swain is a pest controller from Yorkshire who has paying clients who help him shoot. He had a job for a farmer to clear out a large number of Canada geese. They shot some geese and he posted the photo of the result on Facebook. It had lots of ‘likes’ from his friends. Imagine his surprise to find himself on BBC regional news that evening.

That was in September 2019. Since then he has endured being arrested and left in police cells for five hours then released without charge, pursued and threatened by anti-hunters both face-to-face and online, and to cap it all the local MP, Stuart Andrew, MP for Pudsey in West Yorkshire, has written to the Secretary of State for the Environment asking her to find a reason to stop Barry going about his lawful legitimate activity. Here is his story.

In May 2020, police took away his guns. Barry says it follows a complaint from a local anti that he was selling goose meat to local restaurants. West Yorkshire Police counter-claims that officers have the “power to revoke an individual’s firearms certificate based on a thorough assessment of a range of criteria” but refuses to give details, only that the it made the decision “following a detailed review of the circumstances”. Barry has meticulously filmed all his encounters with antis and police, recording the routine harassment and apparently hapless police responses on video.

BASC says it backs Barry 100% and slams West Yorkshire Police as “ignorant”.

Despite messages from you viewers boosting his moral, Barry’s world is still a complicated one. Police are telling him one thing, while the farmer who employs him to rid his land of Canada geese says something else. At the same time, the harassment continues.

In this follow-up video, Barry also offers advice to anyone else in the same boat.

 

Click here for all our stories about Barry

 

 

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