It’s Time for Action on Airguns
by GCN on 18-08-2024
PRESS RELEASE 19 August 2024
It’s Time for Action on Airguns
The appalling incident in which six people, including five children, were shot with an air rifle in Sheffield on 14th August raises, yet again, the need to bring air weapons under more effective control. Three of the children required operations to remove air pellets and five teenagers were arrested by South Yorkshire Police following the incident.
The last Conservative Government undertook a consultation exercise on possible proposals to regulate air weapons and these gained a great deal of support from a wide range of civil society organisations, including animal charities such as the RSPB and RSPCA, which frequently report animal cruelty involving air weapon misuse. However, the Government, supported by shooting organisations, declined to take further action. A rising profile of air weapon offences makes a reconsideration of that decision imperative.
Air weapons account for approximately a third of all recorded gun crime offences, that is, in the region of 2,500 offences per year (ONS: HoC Library). This is generally thought to be a significant under-counting as many air weapon offences involving wild animals and domestic pets, as well as criminal damage, go unreported. A former Home Affairs Committee Report referred to the ‘casual cruelty’ of air weapon misuse.
Air weapons offences are most often recorded when the weapon is actually fired (around 80% of the time), rather than simply used to intimidate. It follows that air weapons are responsible for the greatest proportion of firearm-involved injuries. Many of these injuries may well be less serious than those resulting from other firearms but there have been over 35 fatalities (many of them children) resulting from air weapon misuse since 1990, roughly one fatality per year. Scotland introduced air weapon licensing in 2016 and by 2021-22, air weapon offending had fallen to around one third of that in the rest of Great Britain. Clearly, it is time for England and Wales to follow suit.
At a time when youth violence involving gangs, knives and firearms so frequently features in our news headlines, we need to take a much more serious view of air weapons. The harm caused by their misuse is consistently underestimated, trivialised or ignored. Yet in today’s complex mixed economy of illegal firearms, air weapons play a key role as ‘entry level’ weapons. The range and variety of air-powered weapons is far wider than it was in 1968 when our primary firearms legislation was passed (the 1968 Firearms Act). Air weapons now come in a variety of powers and some may be converted to increase their energy discharge or to fire live ammunition. All the available research tells us that, in a tight market, offenders access the weaponry they can, and, given their wider availability, air weapons are often the ‘go-to’ entry-level weapons of choice for the would-be violent.
As the Government considers the future of firearm licensing following recent tragedies, it is clearly time for air weapons to be brought within the firearm licensing system.