Ban the evil of horse riding now!
...I am talking of course about horse riding or, as drugs expert Professor David Nutt memorably described it, ‘equine addiction syndrome’ or ‘equasy’. According to the BBC, horse riding kills at least 10 people per year in Britain, causes at least 100 traffic accidents per year (harming innocent people!) and is the cause of three per cent of all spinal injuries in the UK. It is 20 times more dangerous than riding a motorcycle. But, alas, Britain’s horse culture is here to stay. The horse lobby has many friends in Parliament. You might say ‘the neighs have it’. Why talk about horses? Because the emotive and remarkably ignorant response, particularly by ban-happy Brits, to the Navy Yard shooting on Monday - in which technical contractor and former Navy reservist Aaron Alexis killed 12 people before being shot by police - makes no more sense than a campaign against horse riding....

...Well, Piers, imagine if I had been going around in public forums declaring that horses bit 24 people to death in the United States last year, but it turned out that it was dogs that caused all that carnage. It’s an easy mistake to make; horses and dogs both have four legs, right? Does it really matter to the victims whether it was dogs, donkeys, horses or combine harvesters? Obviously, the answer is to BAN HORSE RIDING NOW...

...Perhaps you should do some maths, Piers. Even if Mother Jones was a little reticent about the total casualties, I calculated that there have been 509 deaths in mass shootings in the United States since 1982. That averages 16.4 deaths per year. Taking into account America’s much larger population, that’s a lower rate than horses kill in Britain....