Gormless politician competition for 2021
The highly competitive and much coveted 2021 GPYA - “Gormless Politician of the Year” Award 2021 might go to Priti Patel for her kneejerk reaction to the Plymouth pump action shotgun massacre.
The local squire calling to get a signature from their physician, for a gun licence renewal, is a hopelessly outdated anachronism.
It’s as peripheral to mainstream British life as granny’s table mats with pictures of a pheasant shoot or fox hunt. The real elephant in the room is our government’s incompetent failure to grossly reduce firearm ownership.
Do over 500,000 people, in our congested island nation, really need to have firearms?
Mental health workers often come across challenging circumstances, where legally held guns bring a contentious and unwelcome additional risk.
To be ridding ourselves en masse of weapons is surely the best way forward and a wholesale system change is urgently required.
Should a city dweller ever be eligible for a pump action shotgun?
This immediately exposes the lunacy of our government’s longer term handling of the matter.
Pressurising busy police or doctors to do an expedited and rapid review of firearms certificates, is just plain daft. Fixing a review of each gun owner’s internet activities, and interpreting who is dangerous, will be fraught with problems.
A gun owner’s “social media risk assessment” might be just be another pathetic government bungle, pointlessly eating up the time and energy of front line workers, to cover up top level political and cabinet minister incompetence.
The real nettle, for Priti Patel to be grasping out at, is grossly excessive UK gun ownership: over 500,000 firearms. J T Hardy by email