Why? Because it works. The original stories weren’t written as quaint period pieces, after all, and earlier adaptations continually updated them, right up to Basil Rathbone.
And it’s really not much of a stretch, when you look at it: right at the beginning of A Study In Scarlet we have Dr Watson, an army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan, forced to share a flat with a complete stranger by the expense of living in London – how contemporary is that?
You should try and catch it, sometime – it’s fun. It’s not as though Doyle himself took the thing that seriously.
The royals certainly have shotgun licences, because they regularly shoot pheasants (among other legitimate targets). They have rifle licences, too, for hunting deer. And rather than occasionally, I’d have said that landowners (and, indeed, most farmers) almost invariably have a shotgun licence – or employ someone who has.
I’d be very surprised indeed if he could be sentenced to life simply for possession of a firearm, no matter where he got it from. Nevertheless, he’s a very naughty boy.
The Western Morning News ran a case 2…or 3 years ago of a man arrested and sentenced after he found a gun and turned it into the police. He claimed he thought it was a fake and turned it in just to be safe, the police claimed that didn’t matter, by merely touching it he was “in possession” and so he went to jail. If that was all there was to it, that’s pretty well indefensible, but cases like this often have more to them than the press reports. I’ll see if I can find the link to it.
Law of Treasure Trove.
Since the guns were left with the intention of later recovery, this would apply. And the items would belong to the state. At least that’s how it works with to recovered hauls of Roman coins, for instance. I’m not sure it would apply to guns.
And note that with coins, the finder is paid the full monetary value of the objects. If the guns are useful as museum pieces, it might apply. But if the guns are destroyed, he’d get nothing.
Thanks for those two posts. Looks like there’s more here than met the eye at first glance, and that the defendant might not be quite so blameless and public-minded after all.
Europe almost certainly has hundreds of secret weapons stores. The Soviets planted them in West German for use in wartime by terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending). NATO hid theirs in Austria (handed over to the Austrian government when it was reestablished) and elsewhere to arm ‘stay-behind’ forces.
Add to that long-lost Nazi caves and emergency stashes of Roman broadswords and you have a small, but interesting problem.
Not as a civilian, no, but the military would be really pissed off and would punish him much more harshly than civilian courts. Maybe a life sentence is an exaggeration, but it’d definitely be a lot longer than the civilian minimum of five years.
It was one of the few things from the 21st century reboot that didn’t sit well with me, because the original Watson having his gun from Afghanistan was such a run-of-the-mill thing for an ex-soldier, but an ex-soldier keeping one now is a huge deal. It’s the action of an aggressive gun-nut, not a mostly gentle person who is only violent when absolutely necessary. But I guess that could be another take on Watson’s character!
Fully automatic weapons - machine guns- are perfectly legal in 46 of our 50 states.
Og bless America.
When my socialist BIL asks me why I need such toys, I ask why he owns and drives an Audi A-8 **and **a Porsche 911. A Nissan Leaf would get him to work, but the 911 is a bit faster and more fun to open up. And so is my MP-5.
Like a Porsche, all it takes is money and paperwork.
But he’s a civilian now, surely. So, beyond any punishment from the civil courts, what could the army do to him? A retroactive dishonourable discharge and dock his pension?
I’m not sure about aggressive gun-nut, but there are definite hints of his being a bit of an adrenaline junky (with a gambling problem, too, if I remember rightly) in the stories, so it’s perhaps not that much of a stretch.
I’m making a WAG here, but suspect a former soldier could still be tried by a military court for something he did while a soldier. Even if he were in a civilian court, the military would press for a harsher sentence - they don’t want to go encouraging other soldiers to do the same, after all, and it’d be a PR disaster for them.
He’d probably lose his pension and possibly be struck off the British Medical Council. Those are pretty big consequences aside from prison.
Hmm, possibly true about the adrenalin junkie bit. It’s just that keeping a gun like that would be such an extreme act now, or at least it seems so to me; it’s not something you can just drop in to a character with little comment. But they could take it somewhere interesting - it was a good adaptation overall, IMO.
I don’t know… even if the Army could subject Watson to court martial (which I doubt) the most they could probably prove against him would be failure to surrender his sidearm, which might get him two years at most. And even supposing they had legal standing in a civil court to press for a harsher sentence, the judge couldn’t exceed the maximum sentence for the crime.
Not that there’d be any need for them to, anyway – aside from simple possession of a prohibited firearm (with a sentence of 5–10 years), he’s also guilty of possession of prohibited firearm in a public place, trespass while carrying a prohibited firearm, possession of prohibited firearm with intent to endanger life…
But then, of course, he did go a shoot someone, so he’d presumably be charged with murder, and he probably would get life after all.
Actually, I think that the moment the police started asking questions, Mycroft would swan in with all the necessary documentation to prove that Watson was an MI6 officer, and it would all go away.
You forgot the GLADIOcaches of weapons in Europe that were established in the 50s onward in Italy for fear of the communists; most likely one of these caches was used for the Oktoberfest bomb.
It’s a complete guess, based on looking at this list of military offences. I’m thinking that the most they could prove against him is “contravening standing orders” (ie surrendering his weapon on discharge from the service). They could try for theft, but they’d need to be able to show he meant to keep it, rather than just hanging on to it by accident (“Oh, I’m very sorry I didn’t realise I still had that. What with the traumatic wound, and being in hospital, and trying to find somewhere to live and everything, I’ve only just got around to unpacking properly.”)
Military law seems to be a lot more relaxed about people just generally being in possession of weapons, strangely.
And, indeed, blackmailing Watson into spying on Sherlock for him.
