Each police force in the UK will have a specialist unit for firearms licensing, often based at their HQ, who will make decisions on firearm licences. There is some variability between forces obtaining a licence may be easier in some locales, but the police are very conscious of the potential repercussions of the misuse of a legally-held firearm and tend to take the attitude of refuse/revoke and ask questions later as there’s no fallout for them of the decision going to appeal. This means legally owning a firearm without a demonstrably good reason is pretty much impossible, except for basic shotguns and the few other weapons where a good reason is not required. Also for all types of firearms its very easy to lose the licence, for example being diagnosed with depression by your doctor or the police getting wind of domestic trouble are quite standard reasons for the police to confiscate licence-holders weapons.
If a licence is refused or revoked the police are usually amenable to re-considering their decision if you can reasonably counter their objections, otherwise the only avenue of appeal is to the Crown Court, which if unsuccessful there would usually be no further avenues of appeal.
Due to the strict controls and severe sentences obtaining an illegal firearm would require high-level criminal contacts or membership of an inner city gang with access to firearms. Even then you would expect to pay a lot of money for a weapon that may barely even work (many illegal weapons are replicas/deactivated guns that have been activated by amateur gunsmiths).
Absolutely irrelevant. Most 3D printers are completely incapable of printing functional guns, because the materials they use are far too weak. You might as well posit a gun made out of Lego; ABS is actually one of the stronger materials commonly available for 3D printing. A very few printers use materials capable of making functional guns, but those printers are priced far out of consumer reach, and would be available only at a high-end fab lab. And high-end fab labs accessible to the public all have policies against printing weapons or weapon parts. Besides which, even those gun designs which can be 3D printed are extremely low quality, and are only capable of firing a handful of shots before they fail. There are many other ways of making a gun of that quality that are much less traceable. The real threat isn’t 3D printers, but CNC milling machines, some of which are in fact owned by private hobbyists, and which are capable of producing fully high-quality guns (since it’s basically the same technique used by the gun manufacturers themselves).
Aren’t recent events the strongest evidence of how effective U.K. gun regulations are at keeping the population safe? You have a bunch of people who are crazy and desperate enough to kill as many people as they possibly can that they are willing to commit suicide to do so. And yet they still could not get hold of the guns that would almost certainly have made the death toll tenfold higher.
The 2nd-amendment alternative to last night’s events is a scenario where a significant number of untrained civilians and the terrorists are heavily armed. You obviously can just keep the guns in the hands of “good guys” if you relax gun laws. The majority of the U.S. population seem to favor this option; the majority of the U.K. population certainly do not.
The police seem to be doing a very good jobs of restricting the supply of illegal firearms and ammunition. so expect to find it hard to get a gun, harder to get bullets, and even harder to get the money to pay for it all. Most of the guns about seem to be replicas modified to actually be used, too, and hence have a good change of exploding if you try to fire one.
And it’s much easier for trained Police to respond if they know that the only people wielding weapons (whether legal knives or illegal guns) are the bad guys and not “2nd ammendment hero wannabees”.
Because as has been pointed out countless times - every time after a college shooting in the US, some people claim that if people there had concealed carried, they could have shot the bad guys and saved everybody - in reality nobody would know who the bad guys and who the wannabe heroes are, so instead of saving innocents, they would cause more confusion and thus lenghten the time until the police have everything under control.
It’s difficult to answer. I lived in London for 33 years and the only person I knew with access to a handgun was a policeman who worked in a Diplomatic Protection Unit.
There’s no simply desire for us citizens to be privately armed (why even Doctor Who never uses a gun!)
No, as others have said it would have been much worse if the terrorists had easy access to guns.
It’s much safer if just trained police have guns and us citizens report anyone else with a gun.
Terrorists had easy access to guns very very recently in UK history, so much so that a particular model of a firearm even lent its name to a terrorist strategy. (which one is left as a test for the reader). One of the reasons they don’t bother using them in England is since they will proffer no advantages; the UK has some of the highest levels of CCTV surveillance on the planet and the moment someone sees you with a gun, armed police will be on you PDQ.
[QUOTE=Patrick London]
It is specialist senior officers who take the decisions, not any old copper. And if the statistics show they’re handing out licences like sweeties, by comparison with similar forces, questions will be asked and heads may roll. IIRC, the relevant officer responsible for the licence issued to the Dunblane killer was in considerable trouble. Likewise, in any largely rural constabulary, farmers who are finding their local firearms officers unduly obstructive have plenty of routes of appeal and complaint to the top.
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True that it is firearms unit which hand out licenses.It is not always possible to spends the prety penny on an appeal to the Crown Court. As for Dunblane, IIRC the shooter’s license was perfectly validly given.
[QUOTE=DeptfordX]
They killed 7 people with just a vehicle and knives. Rerun that scenario and give them all M-16’s.
At Sandy Hook, the attacker killed 20 kids, guy had a gun.
At Chepeng , the attacker wounded 23 kids, guy had a knife.
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At SandyHook one of the weapons employed was the Bushmaster XM15. A very similar rifle to that, the HK416 is perfectly legal to use in the UK (a rifle chambered in the.22LR). I would say that its not the question of legality of guns which makes the UK safer.
I went back and looked it up. It was, but one of the local police officers raised concerns as to whether various aspects of his behaviour would justify withdrawing it: senior officers and the public prosecutor decided not, as there wasn’t absolute evidence such as a criminal charge. I think the guidelines on assessing mental stability were tightened later.
It’s not the gun per se, it’s the match of gun to user and situation: you don’t get the permit unless you can prove your purpose AND that the gun you want is suitable for the purpose AND that you’re a “fit and proper person” to have one AND that you keep it in secure storage when not in use. If, for example, you want a rifle to hunt with, you have to say what you’re hunting and where, prove that you have the landowner’s permission to hunt there, AND the rifle has to be technically no more than is needed for the prey in question - and the police will come and inspect your storage from time to time. Of course, it’s always possible for someone with a certificate to go off their head or for their secure storage to be breached and someone else to get hold of their gun to cause mayhem. But the restrictions make it much less likely because there are simply fewer people with guns in the first place.
Hunting rifles are regulated differently from HK416 type rifles the later is Ss5 of the Firearms Act 1968 while the former are Ss7. The Ss5 rifles are expressly authorized, i.e its legal to own, the police have to give a reason not to grant. The application is not particularly onerous (the linked is Sussex police). Ss7, is for any other type of firearms, those can only be obtained vide permission from the Chief Constable, at his/her discretion and with such terms and conditions as they may deem fit.
Both of them are authorized by vide an instrument known as a “Firearms Certificate” or "FAC’, but you should not confuse them one can have plenty of restrictions, the other fewer.
As a result, quite a few military-type rifles are legal for civilian sale, with relatively few restrictions in the UK. For instance,see here
It’s not legal to own any weapon, other than those exempted, without a firearms certificate. Section 13 of the Home Office guidelines to the police on the issue of firearms certificates covers the question of “good reason” to have a weapon. It’s not as though you can just decide to buy a rifle because you like the idea, even if it isn’t listed as a prohibited weapon. Yes, the police have to state reasons if they don’t allow you a certificate. That doesn’t mean you’ll get one.
You switched from past tense to present there, so I’m not quite sure what you mean. As for the London Bridge terrorists, I assume that we can stipulate that they sought to kill as many people as possible, and to create as much mayhem as possible in the process. Given that, are you suggesting that they could easily have obtained firearms, but decided instead to use a van and knives for tactical reasons? If so, I think that’s utterly ludicrous.
If CCTV is so prevalent and provokes such a quick response to an incident then surely I want to carry out the act as quickly and as certainly as possible? In those situations why would I choose knives over guns? The guns very definitely gives an advantage which is why most front line troops choose military firearms to engage the enemy rather than running them over with a ford transit LWB.
If, as you suggest, terrorists have easy access to guns in the UK then they would use them. There is simply no reason not to. They are knowingly going into these acts with the understanding that they are going to die. The fact that they give the game away by carrying guns and that is what discourages their use is simply not credible.
Far more credible is the fact that guns are difficult to get hold of. I don’t know what model of weapon you are referring to above but if it involves the IRA then I suggest you read up on how they sourced their weapons and decide for yourself if it was “easy” or not and whether those arms came mainly from countries with strong or loose gun legislation.
I’ve lived here for 30 years in a tough south London neighbourhood.
There isn’t a systematic way to do this, there are no routes or networks to try and access though ‘a friend of a friend’, etc. There will be guns out there but it’s random and rare.
The only realistic option is to source it yourself and bring it in, probably from eastern Europe, probably in a vehicle. Even then you don’t know who you’re dealing with, and it will likely be expensive.
Last problem; you won’t have a clue how to use it.
I am very aware how the IRA sourced their weapons. And stored, distributed and used them despite the best efforts of two divisions of British Army troops, the entire UK Intelligence apparatus and the various LEA… Even the IRA usually did not bother using firearms in GB. If AQ or ISIS thought using firearms in the UK would give them an advantage they would use them and sourcing weapons for them would be easy.
As for the advantage issue, guns are not (like you seem to think) magic death rays. In real life a semi-trained operator (which is basically what your average terrorist is going to be at best) is going to cause the effectiveness to fall. Gunfire is loud and distinctive. And people don’t tend to line up like ducks to enable you to shoot… they scarper. In an open area like a city center or High Street most of the crowd will dissipate as fast as they can before Tim or Tahir Terrorist can hit them. Most mass casualty events occur in crowded spaces with reduced opportunity to spread out and escape, like the concert at Bataclan, or Orlando night club. Add to this the fact that even suicide attackers at least want to do some damage, being caught at the outset since CCTV caught you with firearms is not the optimum way.
In the UK, explosives are even more tightly regulated than firearms. Tell me has that stopped AQ or ISIS from being able to detonate bombs in the UK?
up the junction, is the Met still focusing its anti-gun efforts in the area on the Afro-Carribian communities?