The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Egg on Leggs1 wrote:Dunnit, who gave that malicious trollop the right to suspend democracy.

24% of Britain's electorate...

Signed.

Another proposal that is an affront to the core beliefs and constitutional principles of our society.

signed
3033

As well as signing, write to your MPs ! More Chance of that section being debated in parliament!
On the petition website there is a link to your local mp email address after you entered your details

Signed - now at 3217 - Letter to MP now.

Just written this out for posting to my local MP. I hope I can be forgiven for plagiarising (spelling?) a large part of it from the UK Shooting News site.

Dear Sir

Clause 81 of the Policing and Crime Bill 2016

May I draw your attention to Section 81 (1) of the Policing and Crime Bill, currently in front of Parliament, which gives me a great deal of concern as it basically states that the Police, and only the Police, will have the future right to be consulted by the Home Secretary when making amendments to the Home Office Guidance on Firearms Law.

Having been left alone for many years since its inception, the Guidance has been very quietly updated half a dozen times in the last 6 months alone. Details of those changes are not notified to the public although notably, our various national associations do not do this either.

It is the Home Office Guidance, not the law, which sets out the recommendations for firearms ownership covering such things as having to store firearms with the bolts removed and in a separate secure location from the gun cabinet or using Target shooting firearms a minimum of 3 times a year on pain of a partial revocation of an owners certificate (note that this threshold was only once per year until very recently).

The Guidance is issued by the Home Office, although in reality it would appear that FELWG, the Police’s Firearms and Explosives Licensing Working Group, decides on its own what the latest version will say and simply tell the Home Office to publish it. There is certainly no hint of a public consultation on any of the changes they make.

The bulk of the guidance is written as a manual for Police Firearms Licensing Officers but in reality, both the licensed firearms community and the police use it to find out what the “law” is and how to obey it.

We do not, yet, live in a country where the Police both write and enforce the rules. Police behaviour over the last few years, particularly from FELWG, along with the accelerating pace of Guidance changes, means ordinary members of the licensed firearms community can no longer be certain they are following the “law” as written, or its latest interpretation. We need transparency and, crucially, accountability from the people who write the rules we must obey.

If FELWG decides that we must use each of our firearms 6 times a year instead of 3 to justify keeping them, who will listen to our objections? Who can we vote out of office in protest?

It may be worthy of note that FELWG, like a Phoenix from the ashes, is a re-incarnation of the Association of Chief of Police Officers, an unelected body responsible for attempting to criminalise the public’s ownership of any or all firearms and which was ordered to be closed down and disbanded by the current Home Secretary.

The Police and the Home Office are not accountable to us. The responsible Home Office minister is accountable only to the Prime Minister and his own local electorate and in any case, firearms licensing is a minuscule part of his wider Home Office brief.

I’m not sure what the legislative solution here is. One way would be to include all of our National shooting organisations alongside the Police as bodies that must be consulted, by law, on changes to the guidance. They will naturally have a wider and more in-depth understanding of the realities of firearms ownership and are best placed to advise Senior Police Officers and Politicians who may approach the issue as only ‘doing their job’ or, even worse, pursuing their own, almost rabid, anti-gun agenda (such people do exist and currently occupy positions amongst those responsible for firearms legislation).

Another would be to have a public consultation exercise each time, although that could get very unwieldy and encourage the police to dump a whole pile of changes on the public each time, in the hope that they’d simply get waved through.

Or perhaps another solution could be to have this proposal taken off the table altogether until a new mechanism for making the Guidance a legally binding document is worked out; a mechanism that ensures the licensed firearms community is represented properly at the top table.

Whatever the solution is, may I urge you to reject this proposal, and any future ones, that could allow a situation to arise where the Police can change the rules at will and then go out to kick down doors to confiscate shotguns and firearms from otherwise law-abiding sportsmen. If we stay silent and do nothing, these changes will pass in the next few months.
Yours sincerely

Iain

dromia wrote:They currently only seem to have only one, the "bent over" position.

They're so used to it they no longer even require lube.

Signed 4312 now

I've pushed it out to my club and I will be print off the important stuff and passing it around the two shoots this weekend for those who doesn't have emails/don't bother reading emails.

Letter to the MP has been drafted, just needs sending.

Don't bother, they got it wrong, see the latest update here,

https://ukshootingnews.wordpress.com/20 ... ting-orgs/

Section 81 only states consultations with the chief police only ! It will need to be amended to with the words "and all shooting organsations"