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Violent Crime Reduction Bill

moved Amendment No. 124B:"Page 33, line 26, at end insert—" ““(   )   Nothing in this section shall limit the number of— (a)   primers to which this section applies, or (b)   empty cartridge cases incorporating such primers, to the number of manufactured bullets of the relevant category permitted by the firearms certificate in question.”” The noble Lord said: I am most grateful for those kind words from the Liberal Benches. I apologise for not having been able to take part at Second Reading, owing to a business commitment. This is a short probing amendment, in which I should declare an interest as my stalker at home in Scotland hand-loads the bullets which we use for stalking and vermin control. I table it against the background of the growing complexity and over-regulation governing law-abiding people who own firearms, particularly rifles. Already the over-regulation causes a substantial drain on police time, when police would be far better employed apprehending criminals than spending days, as they now have to, checking up on the minutiae of how many bullets one has used for each rifle over a period of years, and so on. One is reminded of the time when Her Majesty the Queen’s solicitor lost his shotgun certificate because his mother, in whose house his weapons were kept, knew the whereabouts of the key to his gun cabinet. You could not make it up, could you? I am also reminded of my own amendment to the Bill banning handguns after Dunblane, which would have allowed the slide mechanisms and chambers of pistols to be kept securely in the clubs, together with their ammunition, with the rest of the weapon being kept at home. That obviously sensible amendment was carried in your Lordships’ House by the largest ever majority against a Conservative Government, but it was overturned in the Commons. So handguns were banned, depriving some 56,000 law-abiding pistol shooters of their hobby and sending some 5,000 small businesses to the wall. Yet pistol crime has more than doubled since then and the weapons are still easily available in the underworld. The whole exercise was thus entirely futile and destructive. It is against that sort of background that I bring forward Amendment No. 124B, which speaks for itself. There is a rumour going around the self-loading fraternity that the number of cartridge cases and primers that one will be allowed to buy will be limited to the number of finished bullets on one’s certificate. Given the time that it takes to make a bullet accurately, and that many of these people live in extremely isolated locations and have difficulty acquiring the ingredients needed, that would clearly place an unwarranted restraint on those who load their own ammunition—who, as I have said, already have to put up with far too much red tape. For instance, I am told that bullet heads cannot now be sent through the post, although they are not in the least dangerous on their own and most unlikely to be of use to anyone except the addressee. Also, it is apparently illegal to send a silencer through the post, which seems just as silly for the same reasons. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that this sort of red tape is not to be extended through the Bill. I would of course be grateful for any comment that he might care to make about the wider issues of severe over-regulation in that small sector, and whether the Government might be agreeable to any sensible deregulation, either in this Bill or elsewhere. I beg to move.