So if everything was so fine and dandy in the UK with the firearms laws, why pray tell does the BASC have an office who deals with only those issues and nothing else? Why do they offer 50,000 pounds worth of insurance to cover appeals court costs of suing the police when they attempt to impose unlawful and unnecessary limitations on the legitimate firearms owner?
I held both shotgun and firearms certificates from 1986 to my immigration here in 2005. I had one of the largest collections in North Yorkshire and dealt with many others of a similar interest to mine. I was an expert witness for the Northern Regional Crime Squad in several cases involving the illegal conversion of deactivated firearms back to full auto machine guns. I was also the VP of the Anglo American Hunting Club at a RAF Menwith Hill near Harrogate and arranged a way that US service personnel could have their commanding officers certify they were of good character to enable them to get around the requirement to have personal referees who had known them for 3 years.
In short mate, I know what the hell I am talking about when it comes to Firearms Laws and the way some police forces in the UK rampantly abused their powers. Your supposed idea of having a land owner give permission to use the Hornet on other land is completely and utterly WRONG. The conditions on the certificate MUST be complied with; any deviation from those conditions are grounds for revocation of the certificate, regardless of your intentions or permission slips from farmers.
I finally, after much effort also ended up with an open certificate but the POINT sir, is that nowhere in ANY of the various Firearms Acts is there any authority for the Police to act as they did. Some Police forces are very good in the way they administer the Acts; others are simply horrible. It is the arbitrary and capricious way the law was interpreted that led to Hungerford and Dunblane. In both cases, if the letter of the law had been followed, neither Ryan or Hamilton would have owned the firearms they used to commit their heinous crimes.
You are right about one thing; you really don't know much of the reality of how the Firearms laws are administered outside of your isolated experiences. I take it you never read 'Guns Review' or 'The Handgunner' when those magazines were published in the UK? Never heard of an organization called the Shooter's Rights Association? If you had, you wouldn't be so bloody blase about the pointless, needless and completely unnecessary regulations forced on the UK shooter for nothing more than a knee jerk, political reaction to incompetent police administration.
It still annoys me that my friends in the UK have to put up with stupidity, ignorance and unfair treatment at the hands of firearms officers and departments who either don't know or don't care about the LAW rather than their policies. Consider yourself lucky you didn't have to deal with them; many others were and are not as lucky as you.
