Firstly, I hate it when just a link is provided.... aaarggh
Secondly, legal firearms have never been a major problem in day to day criminal activity. Yes we have had three spree shootings in the last 20 years when horror at the events have been "spun" out of control. Lumping all firearms together, legal, illegal, airguns, replica, obsolete or what have you, allows those such as left wing media and Continuity ACPO to continue to pursue the agenda to take all guns out of private ownership. NABIS is the new kid on the block to this end. Personally I've found the stuff published by NABIS to be fanciful, technically inaccurate and emotional....
Now for the relevant part of the article linked;
"Back in 2008 James Brokenshire, Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, asked the Home Office whether NABIS’ database of seized illegal guns would be connected to the National Firearms Licensing Management System (NFLMS), which is used for firearms licensing purposes, and something called the National Firearms Database, which appears to be linked to the Police National Computer.
The answer was given by Tony McNulty, the now-disgraced former Labour MP. It bears quoting in full.
The potential requirements for the sharing of information between the National Ballistics Intelligence Service Database (NABIS) and the National Firearms Licensing Management System was examined, and discussed, in detail by key stakeholders (including forensic and investigatory professionals) throughout the lifetime of the project management process.
It was found that the potential crossover between the data held by the systems was very small, due to the very low instances of legally held firearms being used in gun crime and the small overlap in information shared between the two applications. Furthermore, the data descriptors of ‘firearms recovered at Scenes of Crime’ and ‘firearms being licensed’ may be somewhat different and, as a result, inquiries would be passed from NABIS to expert firearms officers in the Licensing Departments. As a consequence, it was agreed that any risk of legally held firearms being used for criminal purposes was so low that given the difficulty of automating a matching process between systems, the cost of building such an interface would outweigh any perceived benefits.
The NABIS system has been designed to accredited police corporate data model standards, which means that information sharing may be possible in the future providing that there is a business case to do so."
I thought it was just me.