"The people who proposed the ban didn't really understand shooting sport. These are not the kind of people, or the guns, that run around in Brixton at night. They should at least exempt those that would train and compete at Bisley."

What is particularly galling for the sports shooters is that the thinking behind the legislation was to ban concealable handguns. Something that their equipment is not. "These are not weapons, these are specially-made pistols for sport," said Gault. "They don't look like your Colt Magnums or your Dirty Harry pistols. If you saw one you wouldn't know what it was.

"It looks like a long tube with a wooden grip on the end of it. And it only has a single bullet. It's extremely accurate as long as the target isn't moving. You have to hold it really still to hit the target at 50 metres. The grip is the size of your fist, it's huge and fits over the back of your hand, and the barrel itself is about 10cm long. The overall length of the pistol is 40cms (16ins).

"It's hardly concealable. It's not a weapon - either for self-defence or attack - it's a sportsman's tool, like a javelin or a cricket bat or a baseball bat." Which are probably potentially more lethal.

But, despite all the petitions the shooting sports community made to the government, they fell on deaf ears. "We've put all the arguments to the Home Office," said Page. "But after Dunblane there was a kind of hysteria that took over. Certain of the red-top tabloids operated a virtual witch-hunt against shooters. MPs were saying anybody who wants to own a gun must be mentally unbalanced.

"One of the knock-on effects of the ban, and the vilification, was that it destroyed a lot of the sports shooters' confidence. It's been a long, hard slog for them to build themselves up. If the country's going to call us scumbags, why should we try to win medals for them? It took a long time for people to get over that."

Some haven't. According to Gault, he has been under pressure from fellow shooters not to partake in the Commonwealth Games, to the point it made him severely depressed.

"They think I'm letting the side down by representing a country that took the sport away from them," he said.

"If I win any sort of medal, I would see that as chipping away at the ban. I would like to see pistols re-introduced into the country because it was a stupid move to remove them. They've taken a whole sport away from us.

"Every shooter in England has his back against the wall, and I am going to do the best I possibly can with the handicap I've been given. I'm not just doing it for me, I'm doing it for all the shooters."