Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Lucas

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th February 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

Absolutely. We need to keep these things under consideration. However, if one took the noble Lord’s argument to its logical conclusion, we would ban cars because they have been used deliberately to kill people. Any kind of weapon, including knives, presents a danger to the public. Because there is a legitimate use for these objects, we choose to look at how to balance the potential danger with the potential good. I hope that we will choose to do it on the basis of evidence, which says, yes, these things are dangerous, but we have systems in place which negate that danger. Rules on the weapons the public may hold legitimately, plus the safeguards we take, mean this is not the route through which weapons reach the people who will misuse them. In society as a whole, we have adopted a system which is safe and which allows us to live with the existence of those weapons. It seems to me that the evidence says that is the case at the moment. We do not have a recent history of misuse—of any degree at all—of the weapons which are currently allowed.

It is important to keep these things under review, but it is also important to be sensible. A lot of what is in our lives is dangerous. It is the business of legislators to balance that danger with utility and reach a conclusion; there are lots of different conclusions that can be reached. If we say that people are to have weapons of any description, it seems to me that the current arrangements for allowing people to have firearms are working very well. There is no evidence that incremental banning of particular types of firearm will produce any benefit at all and, as a matter of principle, we ought to take those sorts of decisions based on evidence, rather than because someone feels like it somewhere and no one quite knows why because it is buried in the decision-making processes that created this Bill.

My appeal to my noble friend is that we ought to be looking at where this process is going in the long term, at what we should be doing to make sure that firearms can be legally held, and at the security we want around that. Then, when we arrive at that conclusion, we can show that the weapons which fit within that are not a source of danger to the public, by their nature, because they are not what people who wish to commit crimes will go for.

A lot of guns are being recovered by the police, and by and large they are illegal guns because the guns that are being brought in are much more suitable for use in crime. People will not go for a hunting rifle to commit crime with. We are not talking about hunting rifles in the Bill, but the same considerations apply. If hunting rifles were being widely used in crime, we would be fussed about it, but they are not. The rifles that are the subject of this Bill are not used in crime. There is no instance of them being used in crime. There is nothing obvious about them which makes them more dangerous than other firearms in the context of the controls that we have. As a result of the deliberations in another place, our concerns about .50 calibre are under review. We ought to do the same with the other rifles that are mentioned here and come to a coherent, evidenced conclusion about where in this society we now choose to draw the line on the firearms that people may legally hold and on the purposes for which they may legally hold them. I am not saying that there is an absolute value to any particular place to draw the line; I am saying that we ought to do this on the basis of evidence, and nothing that my noble friends have been able to provide me with at the moment offers evidence that the rifles we are discussing pose any greater danger than the many other rifles that we permit people to hold. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend’s amendment and to speak to my Amendments 78B, 79A and 79B. Additionally, I want to refer to an earlier comment about the Dunblane massacre and the handguns that were banned afterwards. I was chairman of the FCC at that time and remember it very well indeed. The only effect of the ban on handguns at that stage and of the incoming Government’s Bill to ban other handguns below .32 calibre was to drive those handguns underground. Since then, it is fair to say that there are many fewer legally held handguns because it is illegal to hold them, but nine out 10 of the guns used in crime are illegal, and the number of illegally held handguns has ballooned over the years since Dunblane.

I wish to address lever-release and MARS rifles which are the subject also of my noble friend’s amendment. They are used in general by disabled shooters who find it extremely difficult to use a standard rifle. These disabled shooters normally have big problems, such as arthritis in their fingers and hands, or mobility problems so they have to shoot from a sitting position. Prohibition of these two types of guns would cause those shooters considerable hardship and probably leave them unable to take part in their chosen target disciplines and competitions. I am certainly not aware of any evidence that MARS or LR weapons have ever been used in crime, and I feel strongly that they could easily be held on Section 1 certificates with level 3 enhanced security, which comes in guidance to the police. I have no problems with that provision whatever. These people look after their guns incredibly safely in any case. I look forward to my noble friend’s views on those matters.