The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Can anyone confirm that 60% of firearms sent to NABIS are stolen from FAC holders?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... l#comments

I read this as cherry picking to make statistics fit their agenda, 60% of the firearms are stolen from legitimate certificate holders in burglaries in the Birmingham Manchester and Liverpool areas.
Nationwide it may be 0 to 10%, or what it doesn’t say staff working as doctors receptionists in those areas are paid to identify firearms holders from their medical records.
The report also mentions bullets from shotguns, sensational statistics for a gullible audience.

Nice to see that the article got the responses it deserved.

I have heard that if you call police to give them a heads up that you are going shooting in a particular area - it gets added to the statistics for "firearms incidents"

That's a misleading and very probably inaccurate statistic. The problem is, how can it be verified?

If it's anywhere close to being true it can only prove that the Police are either very bad at seizing illegally imported guns or that they aren't sending all seized guns to NABIS.

Either way, it's obviously PR they are trying to generate to justify the firearms clauses in the Offensive Weapons Bill. They must be desperate to save face now they see that Bill is under threat.

I haven't read the article (at work) but typically "firearms" includes shotguns, air rifles, deacts, BB guns etc etc.

From my knowledge, most of the legal Firearms stolen are stolen while they are being delivered by courier.

Police don't seem bothered about that though.

I suppose if only firearms that are suspected as having been previously legally owned are sent to nabis you’re going to get a high correlation, plus firearms seized this year could have been stolen in the last 50 plus.
A breakdown of the alledged 60% would be interesting.

Well - It looks like the article has been taken off the Daily Mail main site - probably because they were getting the "wrong" sort of comments. The link now goes to the Mail App.

How do you go about finding out where these figures came from?

You could start with a letter to the Mail asking where they got their figures from and then follow it up with a FOI request to the official body in question.
Try NABIS directly, best of luck getting a straight answer to a direct question and getting to the bottom of any convoluted method used to create figures provided.
Most likely its just a bit of dreadfully poor reporting, now retracted, but which at some later date can be referred to as “it has been reported ................”. Giving a notion of fact to fiction.