Airguns

I notice today that the Government is thinking of restricting the sale of air rifles to ‘licensed firearms dealers’ only. This is primarily in reaction to the death of Andrew Morton, the 2 year old boy who got shot in the head by an airgun pellet fired by a fuckwit.

Will this reduce the number of air rifles? Possibly, in the long-term. But for now, no, it won’t – people will still own them, and unless the rifles are over a certain power (12 ft lbs at the muzzle, if memory serves – that’s the energy required to lift a pound weight 12 feet.) they don’t have to be registered at all. So no-one will know who has one, and whether or not they’re the kind of fuckwit who thinks it’s “fun” to shoot them at people.

The last firearms legislation came about in 1996 as a result of the Dunblane shootings where Thomas Hamilton (43) walked into Dunblane Primary School armed with 4 legally held weapons. In the space of 3 minutes he shot 3 staff and 28 pupils, of which 1 staff member died and 16 children were killed. Because of this, it became illegal to own any handgun in the UK, and anyone who owned a handgun was supposed to surrender it to the police/government, and receive in return compensation for their guns that amounted to about 10% of their value.

Since then, the number of gun-related crimes has increased exponentially. The import of illegal weapons has increased too, and in fact illegal handguns are now far, far easier to obtain than they ever were before the legislation came into place. In short, the legislation didn’t work.

Personally, I’m not an advocate of shooting. I used to shoot competitively, but had given it up before the events in Dunblane. But I do think that the knee-jerk response to the shootings helped to pave the way for the huge increase in the market for guns in the UK – partly because the compensation offer from the government was so poor, an irate gun owner was better off selling their gun to someone privately (and illegally) rather than handing it in. And of course the people buying those guns were likely to either be criminals themselves, or have contacts with criminals. It would have been better to have insisted that people kept their guns at the local gun club, and could only shoot them on the premises, or at competitions. To make it illegal to store a firearm at home, to make them harder to access easily would have been a far more sensible legislation.

This new air-rifle legislation looks like it’ll go the same way. Great, it’ll be harder to buy one. So instead they’ll go from one person to another, sold or given without any checks, without having to go and buy one from a retailer who at least has some idea what to look for in a person, and can refuse to sell to someone.

And all the time, it’s still possible to buy bows and crossbows with no legislation or registration at all. OK, a longbow is harder to use “quietly” or “unseen” – they’re not the most subtle of things. But a crossbow? That’s a different picture altogether. And let’s face it, crossbows were originally designed to go through chainmail at half a mile – far more dangerous than any air rifle…