Hansard

I apologise for being a minute late at the start of proceedings. I have no good reason at all for that; my legs just did not get me here quickly enough.

I have some sympathy with the cabinet secretary in respect of his responsibilities for licensing. I had responsibility for a licensing bill back in 2005, and I recall that the best advice that I received on how to understand the extent of the problem of overprovision as part of the issues that the Government was dealing with was very simple. It came from the most senior civil servant in the department and it was to spend as much time as I could in the bars of Glasgow and Edinburgh at 1 o’clock on a Saturday night. That was not exactly the advice that I expected to get from a senior civil servant, but I nevertheless considered it very carefully.

I also spent a lot of time with a Strathclyde Police division looking at what happened at 3 am on a Sunday morning and how it dealt with that. I still recall in some detail the night that I was out with that division. The incidents were few and far between. When we went back to the police headquarters for the briefing after the evening to look at how the division had handled various incidents, to review what had happened and to discuss where it knew there were and were not flashpoints, it was interesting to reflect on the number of incidents that had taken place. In some ways, nothing changes in Scotland. We are still dealing with such things.

I heard the cabinet secretary’s opening remarks about making an overprovision assessment across an entire board area. In passing, it strikes me that that will create significant issues. I am sure that the committee will reflect on that at stage 2. I recall some of the debate from some years back, and the trade certainly will reflect on that.

I have sympathy with the argument that Alex Rowley made on the bill being, in effect, a consolidated one. I seem to recall Westminster always being criticised for producing consolidated bills for Scotland. We seem to do quite a lot of that in Edinburgh nowadays.

There is some merit in the argument that a number of members across the chamber have put forward that something as clear-cut as air weapons deserves a piece of legislation in its own right. The licensing aspects that the cabinet secretary has introduced clearly have a common theme and there is a common area of responsibility. There could have been tidier legislation by dealing with matters in that way, not least for the reasons that Mr Rowley gave. There are arguments about the lengths of some of the regimes that have been in place and how they should be assessed.

I want to make some remarks on the air weapons licensing proposals, particularly from a rural perspective. I do not think that anyone disputes that there are problems with the ownership and inappropriate use of airguns. I believe—and the evidence supports this—that there are a greater number of such incidents in urban Scotland than there are in rural and island areas. However, in justifying the bill’s proposals, the current Cabinet Secretary for Justice and, indeed, the previous Cabinet Secretary for Justice have quite rightly mentioned well-publicised incidents in which young children have been hurt by the completely wrong use of an airgun. Those cases are appalling and have rightly been condemned, but they have also been prosecuted through the laws of Scotland that we already have. That point has to be borne in mind.

The question, therefore, is whether the proposed introduction of blanket restrictions will have a significant impact on individuals and practices that currently present absolutely no risk to public safety. That fact should be taken into account in any careful consideration of this matter. Moreover, as I understand it, these measures will not be much of a deterrent—if any deterrent at all—to those who are intent on acting irresponsibly. The cabinet secretary might say that the same argument could apply to many things, and he would be right; however, I think that when we bandy about terms such as “proportionality”—as we always do in these kinds of debates—there is a requirement on us all to make a judgment on these matters instead of jumping to the highest or lowest common denominator, depending on how you view a particular argument.

There is a greater risk for Government with regard to the licensing regime. I understand from experts that low-powered airguns would be subject to a higher level of restriction than double-barrelled 12-bore shotguns and even smooth-bore cannon. I am not arguing that there will be a sudden upsurge in the use of smooth-bore cannon but, as the evidence to the committee during its consideration of the bill and indeed to members in recent days suggests, it could be argued that, as a result of the bill, individuals might be allowed to trade up to more powerful weapons. That would be a perverse and bad outcome that neither I nor the Government would want.

I appreciate that the Government is under pressure to act. Ministers are always under pressure to do something in response to an incident, particularly the kind of tragic incident that has happened in the past, but Government is also about making a hard assessment of alternatives. I therefore urge the cabinet secretary to consider two things. First—and I am not sure whether the cabinet secretary mentioned this, but it was certainly mentioned by other members—it is thought that there are 500,000 airguns in Scotland, and an amnesty would take an awful lot of them out of circulation. Indeed, Clare Adamson, who is no longer in the chamber, told us that there is still a gun in the loft of her family home. I am sure that there are many such cases across Scotland, and an amnesty would, as in other circumstances, be a positive way of reducing the sheer number of guns in Scotland.

Secondly, I strongly advocate educating young people about firearms. The PlayStation and online games that my boys play invariably involve guns, and our national news is dominated at the moment not just by politics but by reports of people drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to escape from Libya, where there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun. There is no doubt that young people are influenced by what they see on television, by the reporting of such events and by what they read online, and I believe that parents and schools absolutely have a responsibility to talk about guns and the reality of what they can mean.

The Government is rightly concerned about public safety, but the crime statistics suggest that the number of incidents involving air weapons is small and falling. Indeed, the evidence to the committee was very clear about that. I could contrast that situation, as others have, with knife crime, which is running at significantly higher levels. No one is suggesting that we should license the possession of kitchen knives—that would plainly be ludicrous—but the fact is that it is easier to buy any kind of blade. As a crofter in Shetland put it to me the other day, more murders happen as a result of knife crime than will ever happen as a result of airguns, and I ask the Government to bear that proportionality argument in mind in introducing this licensing legislation.