I feel slightly sick...

[moon]

if this is true (I don't take anything in the press at face value...) then it makes me feel slightly sick. I will add it to my file of information that I give out to people who say, "why did you leave england" or "do you fancy going back"...




Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun

[Whealie]

We're all rapists too. We posses the kit and the fact that we have no intention is no defence.

[7894yr99]

me too, this is a huge crime by the people who are "supposed" to be on our side.

and police wonder why no one likes them...

[nomad]

common sense has finally died

and the moral of the story is children..

if you find a loaded gun in your back yard " keep it "
as you'll go down for 5 years for being a good citizen and hnding it in

[Lumiya]

Gonna post this on another site where I know there's one or two police officers about..

[Austin]

I have a guns on a shotgun certificate and a firearms certiificate and I am absolutely terrified that if the bureacratic process of notifying the police goes wrong I am liable for an automatic 5year sentence. No defence, no half measures, no leniency, no taking account of the fact I was trying to be legal. The law is black and white - be caught with an unlicenced weapon and you are guilty and there is only one mandatory sentence - 5 years. I think this will have to to the house of lords before it is clear that possession has to mean ownership with intent to own without a licence.

This was a law brought in a few years ago to deal with criminals and gangsters who possess illegal weapons for criminal purposes. As ever with ill thought through, knee jerk, headline grabbing laws, the target audience for it seem to get away scot free and instead the police pursue the law-abiding majority. The shooting press is full of cautionary tales like this.

The law is an ass in this case.

[Lumiya]

Hmmm, change the law and see a load of guilty people walk, or make a single innocent man suffer..Surely the police should have "lost" evidence in this one so the CPS couldn't proceed.

Make me wonder what I would have done.. Leave it in a low wall garden for the original criminal to return and recover or even worse a kid to climb over retrieving his/her ball and find... or pick up the weapon, make it safe by unloading and then put it securely away until the police came.. It's not as though him (or even myself) isn't qualified to make the weapon safe...

[samwise]

Put it away securely and surely the 'possession' charge would still apply?

In this case, the law is an arse from what I've read.

There could, of course, be extenuating circumstances that we don't know about - ex-soldier doesn't necessarily imply clean record etc.

[Daz Max]

Sadly enough,this story doesn't suprise me at all.

Democracy is people having a say in how the country is run,a Dictatorship is when the people have no say at all.

When did we let this happen to us?........

[winxp-master]

Personally i wouldn`t even touch the weapon, telephone the police and tell them that someone has left a firearm in your garden and can they send someone to secure it.

This way your fingerprints DNA etc is not on the weapon at all and i can't see what they can charge you with. Ok to say that now ofcourse and even then i don't know if they could still charge you with something, the mind boggles.