I suspect Ian is pointing only to the misinterpretation of the law, that somehow under 18's must only carry IF's. As you say the law is clear, IF or RIF you need to be 18 to buy a 'gun' these days. Long gone are nipping down the shops with pocket money to buy a spud gun like I used to do (im only in my 30's, wasnt that long ago peeps)...
Your suspicion is confirmed. And yeah, the hours whiled away folding 3 caps together and/or cutting them up with a razorblade to get more explosive force behind a miniscule triangular prism of spud fired down a round barrel :lol:
I also see the risk if we start interpreting the law more restrictive than it actually is, we will create a situation where that becomes the norm and the law catches it up or goes beyond it.
There's also the inherent danger in all bad law, which this undoubtably is, because it is not only deliberately vague in ascribing to the Secretary of State, his heirs and successors, lap dogs, lickspitals and lackies, the power to determine regulations regarding just about every aspect of the subject of the law, which then removes the content of such regulations from full parliamentary debate and, more importantly, the usual ability of the judiciary to simply ignore sections of law which are found to contravene established principles based on accumulated case law, since the law says that whatever the S of S says is the law, without ever saying what the limits of the scope of any such regulations will be; but also and worse, the law also repeatedly gives the S of S the power to be arbitrary, ie to insist that the improperly defined regulations are applied differently to different cases, without at any point defining "different" to mean anything other than simply "not the same case", thus this law creates the power for the S of S to insist that what s/he determines is ok in one case is illegal in another substantively similar case, flying in the face of not only the entire structure of British Law but also any reasonable expectation of the relationship between the citizen and the legislature...
[deep inhalation as grammatically this is still the same sentence lol - recap: "danger in bad law"]... that of it being simply ignored by a large number of people whenever a lack of resources prevents realistic enforcement, which then leads to harsh sentencing in a doomed effort to deter people and, by creating consequences which overshadow the actual degree of risk involved in supply, so that many people shy away, inviting habitual criminals into what must, by the simplest consequences of supply and demand, become a lucrative business.
If anyone doubts that this is in fact what happens, or believes that anything which gets determined to be a crime can be stopped by law enforcement, just take a look at drugs... I've seen people dicking around with airsoft guns, people whom I thought, who seemed to be and probably are, most of the time, responsible adults. Ask yourself, how much bollocks will you take before you'll think it's easier to just get a gang of mates together to challenge another gang of mates to a skirmish somewhere off the beaten track and fcuk insurance, marshalling... first aid... chrono's... the general public...?
