A blank-firing pistol of the type normally used at the start of track races is to become illegal in the UK after police revealed that it was commonly becoming the weapon of choice in British gang warfare.
The Olympic .38 BBM, which can be readily converted to fire live ammunition, has been used in burglaries, robberies and three attempted murders. The guns are easily available and cost as little as £35 on the internet, or between £60 and £80 on the high street.
Full Story – HERE
So add that to the list, which already includes real guns, knives, etc…
Ugh.. what a sad place. I’m surprised the people of the United Kingdom just roll over and let these bans happen. :(
Oh well.. at least there is barely any crime there, and it this ban will make it even safer right? *snicker*
Comments
31 responses to “Starter Pistols Soon Illegal In The UK”
35 pounds and it can be converted to fire live ammo? That might make a good little last-ditch gun, just stash them all over the house. I wonder if it would be safe to operate?
Safe? I doubt it.. but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still work. I wouldn’t want to use one though.
so can someone explain this knife ban to me. is it just a ban on certain kinds of knives just based on their looks and size? (like the assault weapons ban) i cant imagine it being an all out ban on blades. knives are an essential tool for life. imagine chefs and carpet installers without a knife
I have a link to the pertinent laws in THIS previous post.
Also, HERE is a picture of a “knife surrender bin” for your amusement. :P
just hunting knives over 9″…..to be honest we do not have the fascination with guns and weapons so whats the fuss..
[…] a comment » Every Day, No Days Off informs us that the Brady paradise, the United Kingdom, are going to ban starter pistols. Frankly […]
The gun laws here used to be fine, my uncle used to own a Glock, a 1911, .357 magnum, 2 shotguns a rifle (don’t know which). Now he has 2 air rifles. Admittedly he sold the shotguns but he had to get rid of everything else. The thing is, the people registered to own guns aren’t the people committing crime, because they’re sensible enough to get the gun registered and to know that if that gun was used they would be implicated.
Knife bans basically mean you get knives taken off you and can be arrested for carrying one. I think it’s less likley you’ll be arrested if the knife is like a swiss knife and in a backpack out of easy grasp but still, it sucks that I have to be carefull taking them anywhere even though I don’t intend to mrder people with them.
Interesting, how long ago was it “free” there, with respect to guns and knives?
They banned handguns after a lunatic went into a elemrntary school and blew 15 kids away but it really did not affect many people as we are not really that interested in owning guns like inthe USA.
It seems strange for us that Americans cannot dink in a public park but can carry a gun, we all have different values. In the US people can die for their country at 18 but cannot have a beer, here you can have a beer at 16 and die for your country and get married and it is the age of majority. In the US you are a child until 18, we all have strange laws…ours is just not really interested or wanting guns, we are an island it is relatively easy to enforce…
Currently it has been announced that the amnesty is solely for the Olympic .380 BBM and they are to be handed in before the 4th June 2010. Posession after this date will lead to prosecution and a possible five year sentence. As gundog trainers, we use the Olympic 6. A friend has been told via letter that eventually all starting pistols will be banned. I do understand that safety is paramount but ultimately, everyone is tarred with the same brush and responsible owners suffer in the long run. It is now getting beyond ridiculous.
Ridiculous! What are you guys supposed to use now to train your dogs? You’d think the government would offer an exemption for someone that could produce a business licence in a related field.
thre are licensed hand guns for relevent police, security people and special organisations. Also on military bases and in Northern Ireland handguns are not illegal, only Great Britain has a handgun ban
An exemption or licence? Unfortunately not, time was when a person’s education and social position was considered, but now because of ‘clever’ lawyers this is seen as discrimination and so we all have to be treated equally.
Another problem with English or Scottish Law (there is no British Law, – it’s either English or Scottish, with the former covering Wales and Northern Ireland; England and Scotland were separate kingdoms joined to form the United Kingdom in 1707, – though they had both had the same monarch since 1603 when James VI of Scotland became King of England too) is that “ignorance of the Law is no excuse” and this ban will not have been reported on any of the main news channels or in most of the popular press either, – it just isn’t ‘newsworthy’. This may seem strange to US citizens, but guns are very much a minority interest in the UK and this was also true before the 1997 ban on handguns when only a 133,600 Firearms certificates were held by UK citizens out of a population of 60,000,000. Expressing an interest in guns is likely to cause raised eyebrows in normal UK society, which will only drop again if one explains that the interest is purely historical because advances in engineering and technology are generally applied to weaponry before peaceful purposes! A Licence (Firearms Certificate) to own a gun that is capable of being fired can only be acquired for sport and no other purpose; the right to own a gun for self defence has not been recognised since 1946.
Thus there will be people who will own an Olympic 8 in its original legal form, perhaps lying in a draw somewhere, and will have no idea that it will carry an automatic custodial sentence of 5 years if discovered by the police when, say, dusting the house for fingerprints after a burglary! It will be no use getting your barrister (lawyer) to argue that it is not a weapon because it is incapable of discharging a live round either, if these lawmakers have got it recognized as a firearm then a firearm it is! For example, you could have a war souvenir that had been welded up to prevent it being used, but unless it had been sent to a UK proof house to be proved or re-proved so that it was provided with an official certificate to say that it could not be proved because it was inoperable, it would still be classed as a firearm and not a de-activated weapon.
It will be only a matter of time before some upstanding law-abiding member of the community hears someone outside at night and seeing a dark shape in the garden (yard) opens the bedroom window and looses off a couple of blank rounds from an originally legal blank shooter/starting pistol to scare them off (as I have done in the past, – years ago) and then finds themselves surrounded by armed police in flak jackets with HK submachine guns being arrested for having an illegal firearm with the would-be burglar the main prosecution witness! I kid you not!
great comment… sure is sobering how laws got so out of hand over there. I wonder if it’s possible to reverse any of that, or are the politicians all onboard?
Laws out of hand, arrested for drinking a beer while someone else is driving my car? come on. Two states where people can get married at 14 but the age of consent is 18?
No one cares about guns, if they did they would change the laws. Most Americans seem to assume we want their laws as much as they treasure theirs. Truth is we don;t.
A bottle of wine with a meal inthe public park is more of interest to us than having an arsenal.
Of course now there is even a case where a group of Baptists gotten ticketed for saying a prayer in a public park in California. whose got the cooky laws?
It load of crap these rules and bans, i can still get a real 9mm for about a hundred pound, knifes from bout £10+ I can get brass knuckles and get all sorts of drugs….
My mate has a dagger in his room, along with a mini baseball bat, plenty pf penknifes round the house, an axe in his house, other mates got police batons….its easy to get stuff if you got mates with contacts…
How does banning it help?
Yea it’s gonna take a lot more than a few rules to stop the underground. Infact more rules seem to only strengthen illicit trade.
wow are axes illegal in the UK too? How do you guys chop wood? Or is it all about the “situation” you happen to be possessing the axe in?
well, axes are legal so long as you dont have them on the street with you, but there so many ways around laws, and its so easy for me to find people to get me things, that its ridiculous…
in my school, me and my friends have smoked joints, and even used a bong (at lunch, not in class) :P
so to keep making laws, is just gonna make people who sell illegal stuff richer to be honest haha!
Damn that sucks you always need to watch yourself involving anything sharp or pointy.
I totally agree. It’s been proven here similarly with the “war on drugs” .. what a joke that is/was.
Cannabis and marijuana possession is not illegal and no copper would ever bang you up for possession, at least here…..I think in the US it is probably a little different where you can;t even have an open can of beer in public
No axes are not illegal, I got mine from a hardware store. If you walk down to a football match with an axe over my shoulder then I would be likely stopped as asked what the hell I wanted it for.
[…] you are still looking for more UK related LOLz, check out the posts I did on Starter Pistols and Knife Surrender […]
I have one of these pistols but it is a .22 rim fire version which is still legal, i use it for warding off burglars (got stabbed a while ago) Ive got a 12g shotgun and a .223 rifle but wouldn’t use these unless someone was in the house and even then the stupid UK laws would lock me up for protecting my family!
Its kind of stupid really that people were and probably still are converting the Olympic 6 it would most likely explode in your hand when subject to live ammo causing serious injury and possible death.
mines bright orange but if someone knocked off a couple blanks at me i wouldn’t be sticking around to find out if they had lead in em or not,
anyway hope the .22 doesn’t get banned the government should re legalize the .380 and let the undesirables who convert them hand grenade themselves.
Wow! I live in Illinois, USA, and I thought our firearms laws were getting ridiculous! Makes me realize I need to make another donation to the NRA.
Our current Administration holds up the European system of just about everthing from health care, to gun control as the shining examples of how the US should be. I think it’s interesting that your Nanny State won’t let you guys over the in the UK can’t even have a pocket knife or starter pistol let alone a semi-automatic firearm for reasons of public safety, yet I would love to to be able to buy a Range Rover Defender and I can’t because it doesn’t have air bags and other required safety features or meet our emmissions standards.
I like how everybody is bashing the government of the UK for its weapons bans, but I for one am happy to oblige by these laws. The reason? Chavs. I would rather the majority of people have no weapons, then have even a few chavs lay their hands on a decent weapon. If you really wanted to fire a weapon and get good at it, you’d join the army.
This horrific abuse of a nations laws, began with the degenerate pathological liar traitor & war criminal “Tony Liar” and the nest of vermin it called a government! they have replaced our “once very able police force” with very much less able characters,run by the very incompetant and largly treasonous ACPO they now swagger about like delinquants, attempting to hide their character deficiencys behind fancy batons, hand cuffs, pepper sprays, and fxcking pony tails! the liebour party just subjected this country to 13 years of open, unadulterated treason, during which time they introduced thousands of new laws and spurious ledgistlation, none of which has done anything but allow them to abuse people as they go about there buisness, they flooded the country with forign nationals and attempted to gag free speech, in a vain attempt at having us become part of the obese toilet in belgium they call the eu! As for the idiot above (shaky) Aye very! if a fxcking ned wants a dagger all it will do is break a bottle or a pane of glass and wrap duct tape round it, find that in an x ray! Also starting pistols are made of soft aloy real guns are made of increadibly tough steel, you’re a fxcking moron! tony liar should be in prison along with blunket,brown the ACPO, jullia middleton and hundreds of others I remember this nation before all these lie’bour bans, and we had way less crime!
As someone training to be a Doctor I can tell you that a glass and duct tape look very different to our fleshy parts under x-ray. This isn’t prison there’s no need to make a “shiv” buddy.
i think it is a bit stupid how you can still get the bright orange starter pistols that can be converted just as easily
Thomson, are you realy as retarded as your idiotic comment tells us that you are? Or are y running a hidden agenda and hope that your “your mind numbingly” simplistic witterings will find fertile ground between the ears of anyone dim enough t believe you? ether way, none, but the most chalenged amongst us, will ever, even for a moment, believe that banning starting pistols (or painting them orange)! for that matter will ever do anything but help the degenerates of the fabiens turn even more of this once very able nation into more of the infantile shallow cabbages we currently find in the media! Starting guns are made from the same aloy toy cars are die cast from, they are as soft as plastic, the presure in the chamber of a real gun is very often 8-20+ tones a square inch, on firing and would turn your cap gun into mince! Besides anyone with an ounce of schoolboy wit who actualy wanted a gun, would simply build one from scratch from chunks of appropriate steel!
Too right don’t want these fucking plastic gangsters shootin my ppl…..get these toys off the street and get back to our bows n arrows.
are guilty stupid politicians