Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Lord Paddick and Earl of Cork and Orrery

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

[The Earl of Cork and Orrery]

My Lords, I will add a couple of points. It is very instructive to look up “sniper rifles” on Google because you get a huge list of them, the vast majority at 7.62 calibre not .50 calibre. It is also interesting to see that three of the most popular .50 calibre rifles are made in this country and well known globally as some of the most popular sniper rifles. There are currently believed to be 200 large- calibre rifles in the UK, which is not a very substantial number. The cost of acquiring one of these .50 calibre target rifles is also not cheap—about £20,000 for the whole package, so there are never going to be very many of them.

Another point, which has already been made, is that only one of these rifles has ever been stolen in this country and it was found shortly afterwards, dumped by the opportunist thief, who realised that there was absolutely nothing he could do with it. They weigh about 36 pounds, which means they are not exactly the easiest things to carry around, and are very substantial in length—a length from here to the end of the desk. So we are talking about a rare beast indeed.

[Lord Paddick]

My Lords, I hate guns, so I have no interest in promoting any cause. I do not want to trivialise firearms offences because they can be very serious, but they are relatively small in number compared with the number of knife crime offences, for example. Only 1% of non-air weapon firearms offences involve rifles. Bearing in mind the very low number of offences committed using rifles, can the Minister tell the Committee why the Government have set these hares running?