I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the conduct within this thread. Snowy has totally gone off at the deep end and that in itself is nobody's fault, but nonetheless this thread has the distasteful flavour of bullying along with whatever else it is. It's in the tones used to post: no one thing which we as mods could point to and say, "yeah, right there, that sentence was out of order," but hey, a forum is not the letter of its rules, it is a vibe, and what separates us from other airsoft forums is just how relaxed and friendly the vibe usually is around here...
On some points of fact, eBay rules do indeed bar the sale of BB Guns, however they do not bar the sale of parts, be they RIF, IF, or internal. We see plenty of such threads all the time and while I wouldn't be surprised to find out for certain that some people do choose to report those threads which break up a working gun into 2 or more listings, that is a practice about which it is for eBay to set their policy. It most certainly is not an offence under the VCRA to sell parts of an RIF. It would be an offence for the buyer, if s/he was not a skirmisher (etc), to manufacture an RIF out of parts, but that is not the concern of the seller, or any broker, such as eBay or indeed a forum.
Perhaps this flaw in the VCRA is one of the reasons ACPO declared the law unenforcible, but then again there are so many inconsistencies and flaws, along with more holes than the Pornstar Oscars, in the VCRA that it's probably impossible to tell which ones in particular the police have read, sighed, looked at each other and grinned sardonically, before mentally filing under A for 'As if lol'...
As for protecting our sport from events which the likes of the Daily Fail would use as cause celebre to try banning us, it's a laudable concern IMO, but this thread is a good example of how not to go about it. I'm hoping that Snowy can be persuaded to come back, but if not he may very well decide 'fuck it, I don't care about the consequences for these people which my actions may bring about'. Now, for sure I started with saying that the bloke was overly touchy, and I do maintain that nobody here is responsible for him leaving, but the point still stands: if we treat questions which ask about things close to the boundaries of what is or isn't illegal with derision, then those questions will be asked less often and the discussion which follows, within which what we consider to be best practice, regardless of what we know*, and the reasons we consider being responsible to be important, will not happen. Bear in mind there are lurkers reading these threads too...
* The fact that we know that nobody is actually going to be arrested under the VCRA. At most it may just be a further charge tacked on to Public Order and/or Firearms offences if somebody were to do something really stupid like get their self-manufactured RIF out in public and/or threaten people with it. The trouble is, because the VCRA is such bad law, the CPS would probably decline to attempt a prosecution and those charges would be dropped before the defendant got to court.
