It's amazing how well their gun culture stopped the tyrannical dictatorship from taking over!!!!

Good point, thank god, wait a minute...

Gonna guess it's due to left over fragments from WW1?

If you just want to plink in your backyard then just get a BB gun that shoots steel BBs. And only use iron sights which will teach you instinctive aiming. I'd say that's actually way more fun than a scoped air rifle. If you're not going to be head shorting squirrels then you don't really need the accuracy of a dialed in air rifle. Looking in a scope at a piece of paper and shooting the same hole looses its appeal pretty quickly.

For Air rifles you can have a bullet catcher that is basically a funny shaped tin can you put your paper target in front of. It will collect the lead if you hit the target.

You can get pellets and ball ammo in other materials. Might have to special order them, not sure how available they are over there, but they do make them. I have steel ammo for my air pistol, it's my back yard pleasure shooting gun, so lead isn't acceptable to me.

I can't be asked to get a license for a proper firearm

My god, what tyranny you live under, please tell me what authoritarian country you live in so uncle sam can come free you after we're finished with Iran.

The US banned lead birdshot in 1991. Are they eating squirrels?

That's a very un-American solution. I think it would be much better to sell fire arms to eagles so they become aware of the problem and they can effectively hunt fresh prey and thereby circumvent the entire issue.

We did that in California. It worked.

Ban lead bullets then

Are you insane? These brave Eagles are dying to protect our freedom

They've been trying. I occasionally glance through the nra's magazine because a family member is lust-addicted to the stories of people shooting others to defend themselves, and there have been little articles in their 'defending gun rights' section about lead bullet bans for at least a decade now. The nra and other gun lobbies have a lot of money to throw at the issue, and have actually overturned some of the bans, I believe.

I dream sometimes of all the regressives in the world getting into a rocket ship and blasting off for some fantasy Planet B, leaving the progressives behind to clean up the mess.

And we do, and it's terrible, but slowly the world heals.

Then the regressives realize that Planet B is too far away, and that Earth is actually faring pretty well now, and they try to come back.

When we don't let them set foot on Earth, they promise to nuke us from space, and then there's this standoff with them in orbit pointing a weapon at the only place that can support their progeny.