WFSA Current News - July, 2005

July 24, 2005

MP to head Countryside Alliance in the UK
            Kate Hoey, a former Labour Minister for Sport, is to take the chair of the lobby group the Countryside Alliance.           
            Coming from a country background, she herself participates in outdoor pursuits such as shooting. She has continued to criticize bans on sporting handguns in Britain, and in particular has gone on the record as decrying the anomalies in the way the bans affect Olympic competitors in the shooting sports. Since the bans in the late 1990s, crime rates have not fallen, and British handgun shooters have been forced either to give up their shooting, or make the journey to other countries such as Switzerland and France to practise. Kate Hoey has long seen the unfairness of this and called for immediate exemptions for the UK Olympic competitors.
            She is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying: "All we have done is to criminalise law-abiding shooting and made it difficult for young people to become Olympic shooters while you can get a handgun on the streets as easily as getting a parking space."
            With the 2012 Olympics scheduled to be held in London, the Games are going to present the need for exemptions for sporting competitors from other nations. "Bad law always in the end falls into disrepute and gets changed or fades away," she said.

July 21, 2005

Gun laws to change in The Netherlands
            The Ministry of Justice has announced a tightening of gun laws in The Netherlands.
            The Koninklijke Nederlandse Schutters Associatie (KNSA) will operate as a blanket body with the power to give potential gun owners bona fide status, and anyone wanting a permit will need to be a member of a shooting club that bears affiliation with it.
            Individuals will be issued gun licences through their own clubs via the KNSA. Strict storage requirements will be applied, and licences may be revoked for an offence called “moving in criminal circles”. Before receiving their accreditation, prospective members will be required to present a certificate of good behaviour.
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=22085&name=Gun+laws+to+be+tightened

July 13, 2005

Anti-shooting moves in UK
            The Countryside Alliance has denounced the move of Britain’s League Against Cruel Sports to use its funds to actively block seasonal bird shooting.
          This action confirms previous expectations that animal rights groups would turn their attention to shooting bans as soon as fox hunting had been outlawed.
            The intention is to block the access of Britain’s one million shooters to as much land as possible. People within the government hold the public view that there is no intention to restrict the shooting sports, which bring in a billion pounds per year to the rural economy. World-famous conservationist David Bellamy has stated publicly that the British countryside is heavily dependent on the benefits provided by the shooting community.

July 5, 2005

Britain’s Royal Mail and lawful guns
            The industry regulator has denied the Royal Mail’s bid to stop carrying lawfully mailed firearms. The request was denied by the regulator on the grounds that the Royal Mail has failed to establish that banning the legal transport of guns would in any way reduce the number of illegal guns circulating.
            Wherever guns are used for small or big game hunting, for competition, by farmers or others working on the land, there is a requirement for means to allow them to be sent for lawful purposes through the mail for repair and in sales, as with any other mechanical commodity. Britain’s sporting gun trade has some of the oldest and most respected gunmaking houses in the world, with a history going back into the Nineteenth Century. Since their inception, they have routinely had to send their products long distances to their lawful customers.
            The argument mounted by the Royal Mail was that disruption follows attempts to post guns because whenever they are found in the mail, the police must be informed. Increasing numbers of mail items are being sent by air, and the screening that goes with this has been cited as a further component of the raised attention.
            Why correctly labelled and packaged firearms sent legitimately should be cause for concern sufficient to require police involvement on each occasion has not been made clear.
            The community protest at the proposal incorporated various shooting organizations including the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the Gun Trade Association and the Imperial War Museum.

July 4, 2005

New Canadian paper and editorial on gun registry
            The National Post of Canada has directed fresh criticism at the country’s gun registry.
            A new paper has been released by researcher Kathryn Wilkins, called Deaths Involving Firearms: 1979 to 2002. It follows the now-common practice of discussing so-called “firearms deaths”, including not just murder by gun, but also accident, and, most important, suicide.
            A trend was in place during the 1980s, and beyond that, there is some decline in overall deaths by gunshot, according to the paper’s conjecture, possibly attributable to the more careful screening of intending gun owners and storage requirements since 1991. However, the editorial carefully makes the point that no decline is attributed to the heavily tightened gun legislation of 1995, including owner licensing followed by gun registration.
            The paper’s figures are said by the editorial to show how suicide by hanging has risen as suicide by firearm has fallen, with the result that there is no decline in the overall rate.
            At the same time, despite the restrictions which Canada has had on handguns since 1934, and which have been increasingly tightened, the editorial also points out to the steadily rising rate of handgun murders. This is another trend which has not been noticeably affected by the post-1995 restrictions.
            The editorial ends by calling Canada’s increasingly stringent gun laws “irrelevant”.  
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/editorialsletters/story.html?id=459a5ae6-d6cb-48de-b47c-881d641e3bf3
             The paper is available at http://www.statcan.ca/english/ads/82-003-XPE/pdf/16-4-04.pdf .

July 1, 2005

Criticism of governments supplying arms
            The UK Sunday Herald has run an article by its Diplomatic Editor, Trevor Royle, giving figures outlining the actual value of arms sold with the blessing of the governments of the countries selling them.
            The article refers to the numbers published in a recent report by the Control Arms Campaign, which said that in one year alone, 2003, the G8 countries exported arms worth $12bn to the developing world. Six countries, it said – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Germany and Italy – are the world’s biggest suppliers of arms.
         The thrust of the restrictions called for is such that once again, no allowance is made for the sporting, subsistence and defensive use of arms. The kinds of restrictions called for are likely to hamper legitimate civilian arms use, and at the same time be ignored by large-scale exporters of military arms who are prepared to disobey the laws.