Originally posted by delta_7890
I hear even the cops in the UK don't carry guns. Oo; That's a little..um..daring.
It's not particularly necessary in the UK; there is a special division (SO19, I think) who are trained to use and carry guns for responding to firearms incidents. It's rare enough to be major news when it does happen.
I think part of the reason behind the replica firearms legislation is that people have been killed for brandishing 'apparent' firearms at police; the second is simply that, in a gun-free (relatively) culture the threat of a convincing replica firearm is far greater than in somewhere like the US where guns are, AFAIK, fairly common and easily accessible.
I'm...ambivalent on this issue. I don't see a real
need for airguns, so I'm not exactly gutted. Likewise replicas; they're not needed for anything (and it does say that there are exclusions, like for re-enactments / wargames, so hopefully said exclusions would be a sensible balance - unlikely for this government, though).
I do think it makes sense to regulate or ban the sales of martial arts weapons, swords, combat knives, etc; i.e. things which are designed for use as weapons rather than having a secondary purpose (such as kitchen knives). Regulation/registration rather than an outright ban would seem reasonably prudent; the issue of registration *should* put an issue of responsibility upon the buyer; it might be useful in tracing weapons sold on the black market back to a legally responsible owner.
The main issue to me is that, in general, this government is dedicating itself to trying to solve problems without even paying lip service to understand why the problem even exists - why do people shoot at fire engines (etc) with airguns, why do we get bands of ****-faced 16 year olds bottling people, etc. Ultimately, they're just making a face-effort attempt to remove the problem by illegalising it, when all that ever achieves is to drive it underground and make it even harder to tackle the underlying root cause.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who noticed the insanity of the black-box-in-car 'taxation' scheme. No-one in the TV news seems to have identified the inherent risk and civil rights issue of having government tracking of every car - despite the debbate over ID cards being fairly fresh inthe minds.
