SIR – In high-street newsagents and on supermarket shelves across the country, children have easy access to gun magazines that encourage and even celebrate the killing of animals for ‘sport’.

These publications feature shooters posing boastfully alongside animals they have just slaughtered. Grinning young children are also shown holding up or standing over shot pheasants, rabbits, foxes and pigeons.

A new Animal Aid report, Gunning For Children: How The Gun Lobby Recruits Young Blood, argues that such lurid, pro-violence content could have a corrosive, long-lasting effect on impressionable young minds. We are calling for these magazines to be consigned to ‘top shelf’ positions, and for a ban on their sale to under-18s. This would bring them in line with tobacco products and with publications with an explicit sexual content.

You can find out more about our top shelf campaign by sending for a free information pack, or by visiting animalaid.org.uk.

Andrew Tyler, Director, Animal Aid, The Old Chapel, Bradford Street, Tonbridge, Kent