GIVE US BACK OUR GUNS

Not sure where I stand on this.
I believe 100% that our police force should be armed.
Not sure why the public needs handguns. The arguement about being able to defend your home is ok, but you can already do that. Just get a shotgun licence.

So id probably say no.
Leave it as it is.

 

Home or personal defence is not a valid reason for requesting a firearms license. In fact, if you put it on your application you will be automatically rejected.

Handguns are mainly owned for target shooting, collecting and selling. I could go on about this length having personal experience, however my main point is that gun crime has never been predominantly carried out by legally owned weapons. I genuinely believe that the right to buy and own handguns should be reintroduced, however the licensing process and requirements should be more competent.

As for why people want to own hanguns, for most of us it's the appreciation of precise mechanical engineering of components that works together to harness a violent explosive reaction and convert it into a focused and precise result, the application of which requires the addition of human skill, which can in turn be measured against your own historic performance and against that of others.

I would give this comparison - the enjoyment in the ownership, maintenance and practice of use of handguns is very similar to that of motorbikes. Anyone who loves working on their bike to extract the maximum reliability and performance, all of which is then subject to the human input and skill to produce a result, already understands that concept.

It's also simply fun to make loud noises People enjoy fireworks - it's part of the same thing in many ways.

I contend that there are far more people killed by cars driven by incompetent, inattentive, lazy, unlicensed or infirm drivers every single year than are ever killed by legally owned firearms. The hangun ban introduced in 1997 completely failed to reduce gun crime in any way whatsoever. In fact, it made it worse. The government forced legal handgun owners to hand in their guns for a paltry compensation offer, for those guns to be melted down and destroyed. In fact, many of those guns were actually sold by the government to third world countries who have little or no meaningful gun control laws. Those guns very easily found their way out of those countries and back into the UK in the hands of criminals. So effectively all the goverment actually did was took a well-maintained high quality supply of handguns and put them into the hands of criminals.

Handguns are expensive. Legal owners in the UK paid hundreds and hundreds of pounds for their firearms. My Dad, my brother and I were target shooting enthusiasts and my Dad had spent 20 years building a small collection of 7 or 8 high quality handguns, the net cost of which was close to £10,000. He was forced to hand them over and offered the default compensation of £50 per weapon. If you wanted to dispute the £50 you rejected it and were put into a process for individual valuation. The government closed the scheme before most people got any valuation, closed the contact numbers and offices and basically f*cked everyond off. So my Dad was forced to hand over £10k of legally owned, well-maintained high quality handguns and never received a penny of compensation. To add salt to the wound, most of those will most likely have been sold by the government to third world countries and some may well now be in the hands of criminals right here in the UK.

Private handgun ownership - not a problem IMHO and equally as justifiable as owning a set of golf clubs. No practical legal purpose other than competing against yourself and others, but could still be easily used to hurt or kill someone in the wrong hands.

 

Jim
Youd have to be pretty fucking stupid to put home defence as a reason to own a gun.
But if thats your aim, you can very easily get a shotgun license.
My ex work colleague used to sign them as he was a jp.

 

I agree, Lee. However the age old argument about handgu ownership alwayd entails lots of people who don't really understand the law anyway thinking that those in favour of legal ownership are talking about home defence and personal protection, neither of which are what is being asked for. The general public perception of people who want to own guns is that of either some survivalist/home defence nutjob or of someone who wants to carry a concealed weapon for self defence, neither of which are true or even lawful uses.

In simple terms, handgun ownership for most people is about an appreciation of engineering and mechanical beauty. It's akin to owning a classic motorbike for many, and man's affinity for all things mechanical is well known and needs no explaining to most of the people on here.

The problem revolves significantly around a lack of understanding. Let me turn this discussion in a different direction for a second and bring up Airsoft skirmishing. Grown adults dressing up and playing at soldier. To most people they just can't underdtand it but to those who enjoy it can and often do spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds on equipment and guns. If all they wanted was the fun of running around a field shooting at each other with BB guns there wouldn't be such a huge amount of money spent. It's a love for the aesthetic design of the equipment and in many instances for the mechanical design as well. You may as well ask those people about why they'd pay hundreds more for a specific BB gun that does exactly the same as another much cheaper model. Why they pay for muzzle suppresors, vertical grips, laser sights etc. when none of them are actually necessary or serve much purpose/benefit.

Handgun ownership is in many instances very similar to other activites and sports that aren't necessarily mainstream, in that the appeal of it isn't understood by most people and the proponents of that activity are looked upon as a bit strange as a result.

Given that most people are scared of the proliferation of firearms and gun crime, consider this: in Switzerland there is a requirement for most males 20-30 years old to be conscripted for militia training (as Switzerland has no standing army, instead having a dispersed militia defence network throughout the country). Those members are issued with (in most cases) a fully automatic assault rifle which most keep at home (although some use a local armoury to store it). There is a swathe of private firearm ownership there, with roughly 1 in 3 homes containing firearms. They also have the lowest gun crime statistics in the world. Similar stories come from Canada and other countries.

Conclusion? It's not the guns that kill people. It's people that kill people. In a society where firearm ownership is backed up by proper education, competent licensing and respect for the weapons, there is no problem. In the UK the vast, VAST majority of gun crime is committed with illegaly-owned firearms. The ban and confiscation of handguns has made no change to that whatsoever. All it did was remove handgun ownership from the law-abiding enthusiasts (after Hungerford automatic assault rifles were banned and after Dunblane all handguns were banned) and concentrate it into the criminal fraternity, with no realistic reduction in gun crime whatsoever.

So what purpose does the ban serve? None. I would never want to see public carrying of firearms for self defence as the horrific situations Paul has described already very quickly come to pass, however the ban on handguns was a knee-jerk reaction to the Dunblane massacre in an attempt to quell the mob mentality that turned the public against the government for failing to protect them. The responsibility for the tragedy clearly and undisputedly lay with the licensing process, not the fact that firearms were allowed per se. With proper education and firearms discipline, and ongoing competent licensing procedures, Dunblane would never have happened. By introducing a knee-jerk ban the government successfully deflected blame from themselves onto the law-abiding gun-owners. If the same logic was applied to motor vehicles then the moment someone runs riot in a vehicle, mowing people down intentionally, then all motor vehicles would be banned from mainstream ownership.

My vote - allow private handgun ownership albeit with stringent compulsory education and licensing assessments, both at outset and ongoing.

 

Handguns were legal in the UK for decades before their ban in 1997 - we never had any of the problems the Americans have. Handguns are also perfectly legal in many other countries without having similar problems to the Americans (such as Switzerland and Canada, as I've already mentioned). There is no precedent in this country to say that legal handgun ownership will create the sort of gun crime problems that the US has - the US had gun crime back in the 50s, 60s, 70, 80s, 90s etc at the same time when handguns were still legal in the UK. We never had any cops'n'robbers car chases with Fedora-wearing mobsters hanging out of cars blasting the police with Tommy Guns and the police blasting away with their service revolves in retaliation. Why? Well, please bear in mind that the US has a constitutional right to BEAR ARMS in order to defend yourself. That is where we are and have always been fundamentally different. Ownership of a firearm for self-defence is not and never has been accepted in the UK, whereas it's enshrined in law in the US. In the UK you can have a firearms license for collecting, sports/recreational shooting, for work and for commercial purposes (trading). To make comparisons between here and the US is inaccurate and is a fundamentally flawed foundation for an argument to deny legal handgun ownership in the UK.