Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2015
Thank you for that explanation, Mr Buchanan.
Alex Rowley talked about the bill’s complexity and said that bringing together so many items was a mistake. His point reminded me of an old joke about a traveller who, when seeking directions from a local, was met with the response, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” We are here. We do not have a blank sheet of paper. We must work within the constraints, the capacities and the existing law in this place and at the local government level. How the Government has presented the bill is possibly the only way forward to address the serious issues in it.
Despite some of the comments that have been made this afternoon, I think that the bill proposes a proportionate and reasonable approach to airgun licensing. We cannot forget where it has come from. Few of us will forget the two-year-old boy, Andrew Morton, who was killed in Glasgow, or his parents’ campaign to have the issue of airgun licensing addressed in Scotland. I believe that that campaign was a nominee for, if not the winner of, one of the press awards in the year following Andrew’s death. Individual tragic cases such as that, which show that the system is completely inadequate to protect our communities, have driven us to where we are at the moment.
We now have the right balance between protecting communities and allowing the legitimate use of shooting in a safe environment to continue. We have taken evidence from scouting organisations, from people who work with airguns in their day-to-day lives, and from apprentices, and the bill strikes the right balance for what is in the best interests of our communities.