The powerful UK shooting and countryside lobby has vowed to fight demands to tighten the rules around shotgun ownership that followed the conclusions of the Plymouth shooting inquests.
Organisations that promote shooting and other countryside pursuits are planning urgent meetings with UK ministers, arguing many people would be “regulated or priced out” of the activity and may even be tempted to keep guns without a licence.
The biggest shooting organisation in the UK, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), is leading the opposition against a key reform wanted by victims’ families, police chiefs, the police watchdog and anti-gun campaigners.
The BASC said making it as difficult to obtain a certificate for a shotgun as one for a rifle would place an unmanageable workload on police firearms licensing teams, many of whom are already failing to keep up.
An inquest jury concluded Devon and Cornwall police made “catastrophic” errors when it gave Jake Davison a licence for the pump-action shotgun he used to kill his mother, a three-year-old girl and three other people.
The families of four of Davison’s victims called for reforms of the 1968 law under which shotguns are much easier to get licences for than rifles, an appeal supported by the chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, Will Kerr, Debbie Tedds, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on firearms licensing, and the Independent Office for Police Conduct. There are also calls for the price of shotgun certificates to be increased – currently they are priced £79.50 even though it costs up to £520 to process each certificate.
Christopher Graffius, BASC’s executive director of communications and public affairs, said a meeting with the policing minister, Chris Philp, would be sought. He argued that the problem was not with the law but how the police failed to apply it in the Davison case.
There are currently just over 151,000 section 1 firearm certificates, which can include a range of items including rifles and silencers, in England and Wales but more than half a million shotgun certificates.
Graffius said: “If you put shotguns on section 1 you would wreck the licensing system as it stands. They [the police] could not cope with it.”
BASC has more than 150,000 members, a staff of almost 150 – and friends in high places. The late Duke of Edinburgh, a keen shot, was the organisation’s patron for more than half a century and the role has been taken on by Princess Anne.
BASC provides the secretariat for the 150-strong all party parliamentary group on shooting and conservation. The chair of the group, the Conservative MP for The Cotswolds Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, is a vice-president of BASC. One of the group’s secretaries, the peer and former police chief constable Geoffrey Dear, is BASC president.
Members of BASC have worried that the influx of MPs from urban areas in 2019 might have watered down its influence but are comforted that Rishi Sunak represents a rural constituency in North Yorkshire and has spoken of shooting as “an integral part of our community”.
Graffius said: “There are probably more Conservative MPs who shoot than Labour MPs. They have more shooting constituents.”
The Countryside Alliance will also resist moves to tighten the shotgun rules and significantly increase the price of certificates. It too has strong links with politicians and its former chief executive, Simon Hart, is the UK government’s chief whip.
The current chief executive, Tim Bonner, said there was concern “knee-jerk” changes to the law could be made. He said: “Gun owners find it extraordinary that this person [Davison] had a shotgun licence. Our anger seems pathetic compared to the victims’ families but there is anger that because Devon and Cornwall police didn’t do their job there is a lot of scrutiny on gun ownership.”
Bonner said there would be opposition to reforming the shotgun rules. “A lot of people who legitimately, safely and properly own guns and don’t pose a risk would be regulated or priced out.”
Members of the Gun Control Network, set up after the Dunblane tragedy, expressed concern at the influence shooting and countryside organisations have.
Peter Squires, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton, said: “One of the issues is that while the organisations are generally on-message about safety and accountability, down amongst the lower reaches of their memberships there will be many others with rather more neanderthal attitudes to public safety.”
As the Plymouth jury was deliberating its conclusions, thousands of gun enthusiasts were at the NEC in Birmingham, attending the Great British Shooting Show.
Visitors were able to handle weapons similar to the pump-action shotgun Davison used and examine guns priced from £20 to many thousands of pounds. A striking feature was the number of airguns, shotguns and rifles designed to look like a powerful army rifle or a weapon out of a combat video game.
One visitor said he felt like he was in a sweet shop; a father with a young child expressed amazement that he wouldn’t need a licence for an airgun built to appear like a semi automatic rifle.
Near the entrance was the BASC stand, with display boards hammering home the reach of the sport – at least 1.6 million people in the UK shoot; there are 70,000 shooting businesses; it supports the equivalent of 74,000 full time jobs; it is worth £2bn to the UK economy a year.
One of the most popular stands was that of the Fieldsports Channel, which makes a weekly show about shooting sports on YouTube and, with 330,00 subscribers, sees itself as the BBC to BASC’s “Ministry of Shooting”.
Charlie Jacoby, a co-founder of the channel, said hardening the rules for shotguns risked making the system more lawless. “If you make the rules more draconian you risk driving gun ownership underground.”
Martin Parker, the head of firearms at BASC, who was also at the show, said he believed the emphasis should be on making sure firearms licensing officers are properly trained and communications between police and GPs made more effective to make it easier to spot people not suited to owning firearms.
He said: “There’s instinctive reach for legislation. We will certainly make the case [to the government] there is no requirement for further legislation.”
