Law in Scotland -Air rifles
- Thread starter smokey
- Start date
Nothing most likely is any better and it must certainly filled up the admin hours .
ContinShots
Well-Known Member
I was in a meeting with Police Scotland last year. The official figures show a reduction in crime featuring airguns. It is almost certainly down to the licensing regime. However, firearms crime is low anyway and the real issue is whether the millions spent was a good investment given competing resource priorities for other crimes which are more common and arguably more important. I would say it wasn't and it was a huge amount of money and ongoing resource to address what was an extremely minor type of crime in Scotland.
The difference between the handgun ban - which had no material reductive impact on crime committed by lawful gun owners - and the airgun licensing in Scotland is that handguns were rarely misused because owners were heavily vetted under the existing law. Airguns are disproportionately abused because pretty much anyone can own them, so more nutters and neds own them and misuse them, so it stands to reason that airgun licencing may very well lead to a reduction in crime that was simply never going to happen after the handgun ban. But reducing incidence rates for a type of crime that's already extremely low down the pecking order isn't much to shout about when there are such massive issues with far more important types of crime that could have seen real progress made had the money been spend on tackling that instead.
As for admin, the burden of a third licensing regime without sufficient funding has been problematic for Police Scotland. Running three regimes with slightly different thresholds was always going to be a bind and something was bound to give. And what's given is that despite the Scottish Government assuring tbe public that airgun licensing would be, and I quote, "light touch" and akin to a disclosure check, the police are not applying the same process that they do for SGC and most probably FAC too, meaning the appraisal process as seen significant mission creep and is now significant more in depth than was promised when the Bill was going through Scotland's parliament. The upshot of that is that there are some people who will be facing refusal who probably should were the spirit and ethos of the legislation as passed was being implemented on the ground. As a police officer recently said to me when they did an inspection, if you don't qualify for FAC these days, you'll not qualify for an air weapon certificate either.
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