I have always believed that populist legislation is bad legislation, but the proposed licensing of air weapons has a much wider impact on all our safety than the Scottish Government has obviously considered.
Let me explain.
The Justice Secretary has stated that there are 500,000 air weapons currently legally held in Scotland. He proposes licensing all these weapons plus all new weapons purchased from the passage of the legislation. This will require a visit to each owner by a firearms officer. This alone takes at least one hour per visit. There will also be required a significant amount of checking and verifying of details and rights to shoot, which at a very conservative estimate will take another hour per air weapon. Therefore this legislation will require an extra one million hours of police time.
There are nowhere near enough firearms officers to cope with this workload so there must be a necessity to take officers away from normal policing to fill the gap. To complete the licensing of existing air weapons held this will represent over 500 officers working full-time to complete this within a year, and how many will be required for new weapons? Either the Justice Secretary intends to recruit 500+ new officers and train them or he must take officers off duties which are essential for combating crime. The cost of this will be highly significant before any addition for the bureaucratic support.
Apart from the massive cost, what will be the position of the law-abiding air weapon owner who may have to wait over a year for his weapon to be licensed. Will he be committing a criminal act just by having his own property? Also, how will the weapons be identified, given most of them have no serial number?
All this might be justified if there was a history of injury and death caused by these weapons but in fact in the last 10 years there has only been one incident of death being caused by one of these weapons. Highly regrettable as that that one incident was, the reaction by the Scottish Government is totally disproportionate. I would hate to cynically suggest that the sole reason for the legislation is as a lever to get more powers for Holyrood.
David Stubley,
22 Templeton Crescent,
Prestwick.
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