IT IS A sad but inevitable fact that firearms licensing in Britain has been driven by tragedies in which lawfully held firearms were used to commit dreadful crimes. Governments are apt to make knee-jerk reactions, and the burden generally falls not on the criminal but on the broad mass of the lawful shooting public. Such was the case after the outrages at Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996. The killing of five people in August 2021 in Plymouth by Jake Davison, a shotgun certificate holder whose licence had been removed but then returned to
