I agree. But also perhaps more has not been made of it because it is such a small part of the population that is interested. Maybe proportionally a thousand or ten thousad times smaller than would be the case in the US. I doubt 99.9999% of the UK population would even know where to buy such a gun as those under discussion.
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.50 and larger guns are not assault rifles, by any normal definition. Usually the cartridge is an intermediate size, between rifle and pistol calibers. .50 and larger is intermediate between rifle and artillery.
Such as this:
Are .50s not already heavily regulated in GB?
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I mean, fine, but that’s not really the point here is it?
The point is there’s no reason to possess such weapons in the UK, as your picture amply demonstrates.
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I know people who have such guns, but they are fabulously expensive, as is the ammo. And the purchase is also regulated in the same way as live machine guns. It is a completely different world than any sort of normal gun ownership.
Here is one that sold last year: https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/70/2502/general-motors-mk4-oerlikon-20-mm-cannon
But coming back to reality- Black powder guns in the US are regulated completely differently than those that use modern cartridges. I am curious if that applies in GB. Many pre-20th century British military rifles had bores greater than .50.
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These people would probably be very upset if you confiscated their .625 bore rifles:
and likewise, the people who own guns like the Oerlikon I posted before are also very likely to be reenactors. This is an image from the “War and Peace” show in Kent:
Those people are eccentric, perhaps. But probably not a major source of violent crime in GB or anywhere else.
When I think of weapons restrictions in GB, I tend to think of butter knives and such.
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That describes a lot of folks in the US, too. Most of the most ardent gun rights advocates don’t think those rights apply to black people.
I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t be illegal in the UK, but I’m pretty sure that, even in the US, just about nobody is killed with .50 caliber or greater weapons. That is enormous overkill unless you’re trying to shoot down a plane or something.
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Except for .22 rimfire rifles.
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I tried pulling the emergency brake earlier, but I don’t think it was attached to anything.
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No, they really don’t. That’s totally not how it works.
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Can I please make it abundantly clear, as some people are still missing the point, that anything that could be described as an ‘assault rifle’ is already illegal in the UK and has been since last century. Assault rifles are “section 5 prohibited weapons” in the terms of the Firearms Act 1968, as amended by the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988. So it’s 30 years since they were banned. All fully and semi-automatic firearms* are banned from possession (even with a firearms license) by anyone other than the police and the military.
There is no story here. There can be no refusal to ban assault rifles as they are already banned. This piece and the piece it refers to are empty sensationalism, born out of complete ignorance of the topic being sensationalised and apparently a desire to chide a section of the government for being nasty people - even when they’re not doing anything nasty.
- .22 rimfile self loading (semi-automatic) rifles are still permitted, with very restrictive magazine sizes. Although not enshrined in law, you will only get a license for a rifle with a magazine that holds no more than 5 rounds (e.g. an Olympic biathlon target rifle).
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“That’s because your little Melba toasts say ‘REPLICA’ on the crusts, while mine says ‘Desert Laffa point-five-zero’.”
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To be fair, they intended to do something nasty, but since the only thing people with the proper knowledge do is complain the government didn’t have the required knowledge to actually do something nasty.
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Yes, I’m sure the politicians simply forgot they were already banned and just put the ban in a second time. I’m also sure that folks would love to look that up for you and respond so that you don’t have to do the five seconds of googling required yourself.
But then such actions would deprive us of seeing such pointless and contentless comments like ”I don’t understand! Please, explain it to me for I lack the will to investigate myself”. Because truly, without such comments to snark upon, how would any of our userbase find a source of intelligent discourse?
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I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t be illegal in the UK, but I’m pretty sure that, even in the US, just about nobody is killed with .50 caliber or greater weapons. That is enormous overkill unless you’re trying to shoot down a plane or something.
It’s mostly a bad faith move by Rees-Mogg and his acolytes, with the DUP jumping on the bandwagon. It’s not really about the threat from these weapons, nasty though they are.
We’ve reached the point in British politics where the most significant opposition to Theresa May comes from the members of her own party, and everything has to be viewed through the idiocy of the Brexit prism.
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Which blasted things? The things Stephen Bush is talking about, or the things Parliament is debating?
For reference, the .50-calibre-plus weapons the bill was specifically concerned with are high-energy ones like Barrett M82 and M90 and M107 sniper rifles similar to this one:
The Tories who opposed the bill claimed that banning them would unfairly impact [put down your drinks to avoid a spit-take] sport hunters and target shooters (and, more to the point, the toffs with the Rees-Mogg levels of money to own them).
The weapons the bill addressed were not low-energy antique blunderbusses or high-energy military ones mounted on static mounts or vehicles, as our usual BS-shoveling toaster aficionados would prefer us to believe. They’re personal man-portable weapons that can immobilise a truck at 1800 metres and cut through a heavy flak jacket as if it wasn’t there. The bill is trying to help stanch a black-market trade in them.
That trade has returned in force for the first time since such weapons were used by the IRA in Northern Ireland two decades ago, which probably explains the DUP hopping on board; those swivel-eyed religious loons just want to make sure they have a chance to stockpile them in preparation for a new round of The Troubles.
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Not surprisingly given those who’ve backed Brexit from the beginning (including the patron of the current “president”), it’s also become a vector for the spread for all manner of right-wing populist American lunacy to the UK.
It’s strange to see unabashedly posh politicians like Rees-Mogg acting the like “just folks” GOP ones in an attempt to capture the UK’s Little Britain version of America’s Know-Nothing 27% rubes.
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As @gracchus sez above, the restriction was on muzzle energy, not calibre/er, and wouldn’t have affected blunderbusses, or civil war muskets that fire one-inch balls but can’t pierce a playing card at 25m, or that sort of thing. As to WWII reënactors, I guess it might have affected them, but sfw; as @gracchus also sez, the specific aim of the bill is to remove these weapons from the criminal economy where they are indeed used to threaten and/or commit murder.
It is a very Daily Mail sort of bill (it also further restricts knives and “acid”), and I don’t believe that banning more stuff will shrink the UK’s vestigial gun-crime industry by much. But I’d have to be a pretty big shithead to say that 1% more gun violence is a price worth paying for, uh, marginally more-realistic military reënactments. And the important point here is that the UK electorate is fairly unanimous on this; it is most definitely not the will of the people.
(Speaking of which, apparently one of the MPs opposing the high-energy firearms stuff, at least in October, was the monotonously reliable Labour traitor Kate Hoey. How the Labour Party, and Vauxhall voters, continue to tolerate that snake must surely be the greatest untold story in British politics)
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I tried decoupling the carriage I was in before the rest of the train derailed, but apparently that was “divisive”.
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