I have already HAD to do this once in my life and hopefully I never will again. In 1996 in Scotland a disgruntled lunatic entered a school with a couple of 9mm pistols and murdered the children and teachers.
As a result of this in 1997 Tony Blair wanted to get himself elected. When he became Prime Minister he changed the U.K Firearms act re-classifying cartridge pistols to section 5, in other words the same class as machine guns. Thus effectively BANNED from possession of law abiding citizens.
He punished 55,000 innocent gun owners as scapegoats. Despite Blair's changes to the law to "make everybody safe", there are criminal shootings with so called “banned” handguns somewhere in the U.K nearly every day.
Last year Blair's daughter was robbed at gunpoint on a London street, just goes to show how much "safer" he made everybody.
I have heard a lot of Americans say “REGISTRATION LEADS TO CONFISCATION”.
Well believe me never a truer word was said.
All of our legally owned pistols in the U.K were registered in Police databases. They had the make, model, serial number action type and calibre all recorded.
We were contacted by Police firearms licencing departments and were given an appointment to surrender them to Police. Being a serving Police Officer did not exempt me, they were all handed in.
We HAD TO as we could not deny possession of them. Eventually we were all paid compensation at market value by Blair's government. But I would much rather have kept my guns.
We were left with Shotguns 24” minimum barrel length, centre fire manual repetition (not pump action) rifles, rimfire rifles of any action type, muzzle loading handguns and oh yeah the “long barreled revolvers”
Five years ago I retired and moved to Spain. Here the firearms licencing is similar to what the U.K used to be. I have bought new handguns and short barreled shotguns, but recently pig ignorant
do-gooders, people who are just gun haters in the European Parliament are publicly spouting about “banning things” like semi automatics all over Europe.
I really don't need that for a second time in my life.
This actually happened in the U.K. Look at it and learn from it and DON'T let it happen to America.