What's the EU got to do with UK firearms legislation?
A huge whole lot in fact! Remember 1988 and Thatcher's rifle ban? And 1997 and Major's handgun ban? One HUGE difference. By 1997 EU Law had developed. You know that ECJ that Theresa May hates so much as it kept stopping the Home Office act as if this country was run as her private dictatorship?
In 1988 the UK Government banned rifles under then then existing EU Law. In effect there was no real compensation. Private owners got a flat rate 150.00 or 50% of the market value for the rifles alone. Nothing for magazines, reloading dies, dedicated accessories. The trade got...nothing. As was said by the Tory Minister "They must bear the loss as part of the risk of business."
In 1997 EU Law had developed. It wasn't 1988 anymore! There could be no UK handgun confiscation without a full and comprehensive compensation scheme set in place. Elsewise the ban was illegal. Thus as many can recall the guns, the dies, the bullets, the cases, the powder, the moulds, the magazines, the holsters were all compensated for the private owner and the trade equally alike.
It would have been EU Law that would have also have obliged compensation if there were to be any future UK gun ban. It wouldn't stop any such ban. But at least it would oblige compensation. When we leave the EU we will lose that right. The EU was a check on a UK Parliamentary dictatorship imposing a ban with no compensation. We have no lost that in 2019.
Why was Comrade Corbyn against the EU? Because he knows that when we leave that compensation right will also be lost by the gas and electric privatised companies, by the privatised water companies and by the shareholders in those companies. After 2019 he can re-nationalise anything he wants at a value determined solely by the whim of a Labour Parliamentary dictatorship.
The EU and our right to have guns on a EU Firearms Pass and so at anytime take them out of the UK if a ban were in the offing and seek to sell them or store them abroad will end in 2019. We have, as shooters, now lost that and will have to accept what, if anything, the Home Office decides. Be aware...they will not be nice to us. I like many remember bitterly 1988.