Arguably excessive strictness of the existing controls at the time was part of the problem. Whenever tragedies of this type happen and the police are found to have done or failed to do something, everybody (with brains turned off and knee-jerk reflax firing) immediately presumes that the rules and procedures were insufficient. It is more likely that they were too stringent and hence kept officers busy dealing with onerous bureaucratic procedures and box ticking, which left them with no time to consider or investigate actual risks properly and diligently. There's no reasonable point for having a Dartmoor farmer subject to the same level of scrutiny as an urban youth with mental problems, history of alleged violence and wanting to own "assault style" shotguns. Rather than applying ever-increasing scrutiny to everyone, it is better and safer to have a system which focusses on real rather than theoretical risks. I have a degree of sympathy for the officers responsible for giving him his certificate back, because I think they were operating in a badly designed framework which produces too much noise and too little intelligence.
It's impossible to avert every tragic multiple murder, whether with guns, or other methods. However, it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to realise there was something a bit off about that man, even a glance at him was alarming enough.
Nobody senior in the Police is going to stand trial charged with anything. There is no accountability at all in the senior levels of the Police.
