Clause 42 - Possession of air weapon or imitation firearm in public place
Anti-social Behaviour Bill
9:10 am
Mr James Paice (South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
We come now to part 6 of the Bill, headed ''Firearms''. If I may, I shall set the scene as an introduction to my amendments to clauses 42 to 44.
The first thing that I want to make clear is that Conservative Members fully recognise that there is a problem with the misuse of air weapons. I do not want anyone to misunderstand our motives or to think that through our amendments we are somehow belittling the problem. I have some press cuttings with me, one of which, from a Teesside newspaper, reports that only a couple of days ago a man was held in what is described as an ''airgun horror''. The article reads:
''Police have arrested a man in connection with an airgun incident that could have cost a young boy an eye.''
Unfortunately, it then spoils it by stating:
''A Bill containing measures to prevent the sale of airguns to anyone under 17 and to prohibit their use in a public place is currently going through Parliament.''
It some ways that article underlines my point that there seems to be immense misunderstanding of existing law and of what is and is not legal where all guns, and air weapons in particular, are concerned.
I have been looking up the figures for air weapon involvement in crime: use of air weapons is increasing, but not as fast as overall gun crime is increasing. The most recent figures show that air weapon use in crime increased by 21 per cent., but non-air weapon use in crime increased by 35 per cent., which demonstrates that air weapons are accounting for a lesser proportion of gun crime than they previously did. It is important to note that 77 per cent. of all air weapon offences involve criminal damage—that is not to belittle criminal damage, but it is not the sort of consequence that most people associate with gun
crime—and that 84 per cent. of all air weapon offences resulted in no injury to anybody. We need to get some perspective on the seriousness of the problem.
Of course the misuse of an air weapon can blind somebody, as the article I quoted shows. There is a chance that air weapons can kill—that has happened in a few cases—but it is a remote chance. Do not forget that by legal definition air weapons cannot have a muzzle velocity of more than 12 ft lb. To put that into context, that is less than 10 per cent. of the muzzle velocity of .22 rimfire rifle, which is the smallest calibre of a proper gunpowder-fired rifle.