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UK: Tough new airgun laws to be launched
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Tough new gun laws to be launched Sep 1 2002
By Gerri Peev, Sunday Mercury
TOUGH new laws restricting the use and ownership of airguns is expected in the Queen's Speech in November - after a spate of shootings across Britain.
MPs believe they have won a nationwide campaign for stricter control of the weapons following a meeting last week with Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth.
They want to crack down particularly on the sale of air rifles and pistols bought from car boot sales and over the internet with no security or safety checks being made.
John Austin, Labour MP for Erith and Thamesmead, told the minister that around 10,000 air gun offences were currently recorded each year.
He cited the case of 16 year-old Tommy Morris from Abbey Wood, who was shot in the back last year. The pellet punctured his lungs, shattered his gall bladder and is still lodged in his liver.
"I have become aware of the extent of the problem across the country," he said. "I am in touch with campaigners across Britain, including the Midlands.
"Last year there were over 10,000 air weapon offences. Of these 1,600 resulted in slight injury, there were 166 serious injuries, and 62 cases of attempted murder.
"I fully support the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee that there should be a strict licensing regime and increasing the age limit for possession of an air weapon."
Mr Austin has raised the issue in Parliament and has also written to Tony Blair.
A reply from the Prime Minister said the Home Office would look at the effectiveness of existing controls, consider whether changes in age limits would reduce misuse and review the practicalities of a registration system.
But Mr Austin last night said that did not go far enough.
"We need a strict licensing system," he argued. "We have to stop the yobs who can all too easily - and legally - buy these potentially lethal weapons over the counter, at car boot sales, or over the internet with no checks."
Birmingham MP Steve McCabe said: "I am all in favour of a crackdown on airguns. But instead of tightening the law on the users of airguns, we should be cracking down on the people who sell them."
In March a Birmingham businessman was shot at several times in a terrifying motorway road rage attack. His car was peppered with airgun pellets on the M1 near Sandiacre, Derbyshire but he escaped unhurt.
* A killer airgun exposed by the Sunday Mercury would also be affected by the new legislation.
We revealed the chilling menace of Brocock air weapons, which can be converted to fire live ammunition, against a background of soaring gun crime in the Midlands.
A detective with the elite National Criminal Intelligence Service said more than half of the illegal firearms seized by police were adapted air cartridge revolvers.
After our investigation Bro-cock Ltd, of Digbeth, Birmingham, said it had halted the importation and distribution of Magnum models.
http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/page.cfm?objectid=12163756&method=full
Edited by - josey1 on 09/05/2002 05:16:18
By Gerri Peev, Sunday Mercury
TOUGH new laws restricting the use and ownership of airguns is expected in the Queen's Speech in November - after a spate of shootings across Britain.
MPs believe they have won a nationwide campaign for stricter control of the weapons following a meeting last week with Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth.
They want to crack down particularly on the sale of air rifles and pistols bought from car boot sales and over the internet with no security or safety checks being made.
John Austin, Labour MP for Erith and Thamesmead, told the minister that around 10,000 air gun offences were currently recorded each year.
He cited the case of 16 year-old Tommy Morris from Abbey Wood, who was shot in the back last year. The pellet punctured his lungs, shattered his gall bladder and is still lodged in his liver.
"I have become aware of the extent of the problem across the country," he said. "I am in touch with campaigners across Britain, including the Midlands.
"Last year there were over 10,000 air weapon offences. Of these 1,600 resulted in slight injury, there were 166 serious injuries, and 62 cases of attempted murder.
"I fully support the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee that there should be a strict licensing regime and increasing the age limit for possession of an air weapon."
Mr Austin has raised the issue in Parliament and has also written to Tony Blair.
A reply from the Prime Minister said the Home Office would look at the effectiveness of existing controls, consider whether changes in age limits would reduce misuse and review the practicalities of a registration system.
But Mr Austin last night said that did not go far enough.
"We need a strict licensing system," he argued. "We have to stop the yobs who can all too easily - and legally - buy these potentially lethal weapons over the counter, at car boot sales, or over the internet with no checks."
Birmingham MP Steve McCabe said: "I am all in favour of a crackdown on airguns. But instead of tightening the law on the users of airguns, we should be cracking down on the people who sell them."
In March a Birmingham businessman was shot at several times in a terrifying motorway road rage attack. His car was peppered with airgun pellets on the M1 near Sandiacre, Derbyshire but he escaped unhurt.
* A killer airgun exposed by the Sunday Mercury would also be affected by the new legislation.
We revealed the chilling menace of Brocock air weapons, which can be converted to fire live ammunition, against a background of soaring gun crime in the Midlands.
A detective with the elite National Criminal Intelligence Service said more than half of the illegal firearms seized by police were adapted air cartridge revolvers.
After our investigation Bro-cock Ltd, of Digbeth, Birmingham, said it had halted the importation and distribution of Magnum models.
http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/page.cfm?objectid=12163756&method=full
Edited by - josey1 on 09/05/2002 05:16:18
Comments
By James R. Langford
FLORIDA TODAY
The cardboard poster points a gun at its viewer and asks one question: "Since when does a traffic stop lead to time in a federal prison?"
The answer is printed beneath: "Since the officer found a gun in your car."
The warning is one component of Operation Cease-Fire, an initiative by state and federal prosecutors and police agencies launched Friday to prosecute certain gun crimes in federal court, leading to quicker trials and harsher sentences.
The program uses three key tactics: warning potential offenders about the stiffer penalties; cooperation between federal and state officials to determine which method of prosecution would get a suspect off the street most quickly and punish him or her most harshly; and encouraging residents to work together with law enforcement to improve their communities.
Brevard-Seminole State Attorney Norman Wolfinger, a prosecutor since 1973, said the program is a dramatic and necessary step toward curbing gun violence.
"In the past six months in Brevard and Seminole counties alone, there have been in excess of 20 robberies of banks," he said. In some cases, those robberies were committed by groups of people who were heavily armed rather than one person simply pretending to have a gun, as was once common practice.
Afterward, "these same people go back to their neighborhoods, pull out their weapons again and use them all too often," Wolfinger said.
Numbers of violent firearm crimes gathered by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement chart the trend in Brevard County, with an increase from 521 such crimes in 1996 to 587 in 2001. In 2000, however, FDLE records credited the county with a five-year low of 411.
Statewide, during the same period, the number of violent gun crimes dropped from 37,533 to 26,222, records show.
Operation Cease-Fire can affect penalties in even nonviolent firearms cases, however. For example, a convicted felon who's convicted of carrying a firearm faces almost double the sentence in federal court than what a state court could impose.
That fills in a potential gap in Florida's 10-20-Life law, which targets people carrying a gun during acts of violence. That law sets a 10-year sentence for possession of the gun alone, a 20-year sentence for firing the gun and a 25-years-to-life sentence for shooting the gun and causing serious injury or death.
Operation Cease-Fire is part of President Bush's Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, which is providing almost $500 million nationwide over two years to set up partnerships between state and federal agencies, said Randy Gold, deputy chief for the Orlando division of the Middle Florida U.S. Attorney's Office.
Law enforcement officials from city and county agencies said they looked forward to the program's results. "I do believe it's a very good proactive approach to reducing crime in the communities," Titusville police Chief Tony Bollinger said.
http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryA28400A.htm
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Weird forensic ballistics to explain this one! ....(propaganda)????
JD
400 million cows can't be wrong ( EAT GRASS !!! )