So you can’t buy a real toy BB gun at a fair? In Poland kids get them for dirt cheap and shoot using yellow horribly cheap bbs. You can still take that for a real gun though from a distance but it’s a plastic toy and probably does not exceed 0.25J.
We could buy cheap BB guns anywhere before, and there are still places that crop up selling realisticaly coloured ones to children as toys. They are illegal in a few ways on look (breaching the VCRA with something looking realistic) on legal brightly coloured BB guns sold to underage children illegally or parents legally buying them and giving them to children.
They would normally have moved to brightly coloured rubber dart guns which are legitimate toys.
Also, do you have gel ball blasters in the UK? Same idea but it shoot with gel bbs at a very low energy and still looks close to a real gun.
Similar things have been around for some time and these are cropping up.
Due to the realistic look the law is the same, so legally you need a valid use for them to be sold.
Some retailers are either being ignorant of the law or are blatantly ignoring it, and have even stated on websites that the VCRA does not apply. It does
And rubber knifes replicas (we use them in Poland to knife kill in games sometimes), are they allowed in the UK?
They are allowed
And how the hell someone got killed with an airsoft gun??
Not an airsoft gun, but we have had the shooting of an innocent man by armed police, because he had a table leg and an accent a number of years ago.
It was during one of the IRA bombing campaigns in London. He was drinking in the pub and had a table leg in a carrier bag, after picking it up from a repair. People called the police thinking he had a sawn off shotgun in a bag, and had a suspicious Irish sounding accent (He actually had a Scottish accent and was drunk)
Armed police attended and challenged him in the street, he thought it was ridiculous and jokingly raised the bag and table leg pointing it as if it was a gun, the armed police shot and he was killed. This went through the courts for many years until forensic analysis proved the angles matched the police statements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Harry_Stanley
There have been a number of cases where children with airsoft/BB guns having armed police called out to them.
In one case young teenagers hanging out in the street were seen with a pistol, when the armed response arrived and challenged them the boy with the gun pulled it out of his jeans and pointed it at the police. The officer hesitated and did not react, he believed it was a real pistol but hesitated at shooting a child. If this had been a different area the boy would have been shot, or the officer shot by a gang.
When I began paintball in the 2000s there was a well known custom builder who produced realistic paintball conversions using airsoft guns. A few years ago whilst depressed he attempted suicide by cop, starting an armed siege in his flat. His ex girlfriend intervened and the armed officers held back when he pointed guns at them, allowing him to be arrested safely.
On a paintball site the head Marshall blinded a new Marshall that he was 'training' when he dry fired an unloaded gun, the burst of CO2 in his face permanently blinded the Marshall.
http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2009/04/30/paintball-shooter-escapes-jail-sentence-921/
A young child was killed by his brother when they found an airgun, this resulted in a new offence of failing to secure any type of gun from access to children. Very few are aware of this, and it can apply to airguns, paintball and airsoft guns. The penalty is a large fine if a child manages to access your guns without permission & supervision.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/5273902.stm
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/650548/air-weapons-a-brief-guide-to-safety.pdf
... and while that was being brought into law another boy was killed due to parents failing to secure an airgun
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8536969.stm
In the US riot police killed a bystander when she was shot through the eye into her brain by riot police with a less than lethal paintball gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Victoria_Snelgrove
Its also been a fairly common occurrence for people to be shot by the police with airsoft & air guns in the US (Even just for picking one up from the shelf in the shop selling them.
