The Firearms Regulations 2019
Something to try and get you’re head around. The legislation created on the 28th October and laid before Parliament on the 31st October before coming into effect on the 12th December. They clearly had time to rush this through rather than deal with the more serious matters at hand!
In a nutshell it looks like if you own a deactivated gun you are going to have to register it with the ‘Secretary of State’. Quite how that is done does not appear to be clear, but undoubtedly they’ll be a cost involved as with most bureaucratic processes. The most important part at the moment would appear to be:
‘Regulation 3 (notification of deactivated firearms) does not have effect until 14th March 2021 in respect of deactivated firearms which came into the person’s possession before 14th September 2018.’
As with all of our current legislation (not just Firearms) this appears to be ill thought out and rushed through. The punishment for possessing an unregistered deactivated gun would be £200 (level 1 fine) which is about half the price of the cheapest deactivated guns in the UK which doesn’t appear to be much of a deterrent.
I’m not adverse to registering my guns, the annoying thing is that you can guarantee that there’ll be an ‘administration charge’ and knowing my luck it’ll be per gun (and probably yearly)
This is an EU directive and anybody thinking that we might be leaving the EU shortly and the law will be revoked don’t get excited. It’s been laid before Parliament and whilst there might be amendments I can’t see MP’s wasting their time debating something that only effects a few thousand people at most.
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