Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2015
The Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Bill covers a wide range of matters. As such, consideration of a broad range of principles is required, and I will touch on some of them.
Before I venture into the specific details, I will first set out two overarching principles that underpin our position. The first is that legislation should be passed only when it is considered to be good government, not just when it is thought by some to be good politics. Secondly, legislation should be targeted. Law-abiding people should not find themselves caught under a legislative net just because it is politically expedient for the Government to impose obligations.
The area of the bill concerning airguns—or “air weapons”, as the Government wants to call them—raises concerns both in principle and in practice. The bill seems partly to be about looking tough, rather than sensibly tackling pressing issues. Indeed, crimes involving airguns fell by 75 per cent between 2006 and 2013—a figure that surely indicates that the problem of misuse is receding rather than growing. No doubt some people will want to intervene at this point to say that criminal misuse of airguns should be tackled whether or not those levels are falling. I absolutely agree on that point, but making a big show of requiring the licensing of all airguns is not a sensible way of going about it. It may gather less attention, but better enforcement of existing legislation would be a targeted and better act of government.