The future of firearms licensing

As a consultation on Britain's gun laws gets under way, it is imperative that the shooting public is not made to pay for failures caused by poor policing. Ensure your voice is heard, urges Graham Downing

- Andy McCandlish

IT IS A sad but inevitable fact that firearms licensing in Britain has been driven by tragedies in which lawfully held firearms were used to commit dreadful crimes. Governments are apt to make knee-jerk reactions, and the burden generally falls not on the criminal but on the broad mass of the lawful shooting public. Such was the case after the outrages at Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996. The killing of five people in August 2021 in Plymouth by Jake Davison, a shotgun certificate holder whose licence had been removed but then returned to him by the police, along with the shootings in Skye and Wester Ross in August 2022 have again brought the lawful possession of firearms into sharp focus.

It is right that such events should be properly investigated so that any decisions that need to be taken are made once all the facts are known. The senior coroner who conducted the inquest into the Plymouth tragedy reported in March, and he made it patently clear that the principal failings lay with Devon & Cornwall Police. The coroner wrote of catastrophic failure in the management of the force’s firearms licensing unit, with a lack of managerial supervision, inadequate training and a catalogue of other failings that led to the outrage.