Irish gun owners ‘blameless’ as 1,300 legally held guns stolen in four years

LEGAL gun owners are not to blame for tragedies such as the shooting rampage in Virginia, Irish firearms representatives said yesterday.

Ireland’s biggest association of gun owners added that there was no connection between legal firearms and the use of stolen firearms by criminals.

Des Crofton, director of the National Association of Regional Game Councils (NARGC), said the wrong impression was given when shooting tragedies occur.

“I loathe it when something like this happens. The impression goes abroad that ordinary joe public can walk in and get himself a handgun, they can’t.”

Applications for firearms were from people who were members of recognised clubs, he said, and those behind shooting tragedies were not members of a hunting or sporting club.

“In these situations — Abbeylara here and Hungerford and Dunblane in the UK — one thread in common, the individuals who perpetrate these things have some disconnection with society, something is going on in their minds.”

Gardaí have often complained at the lack of security adopted by some gun owners, which has resulted in their theft and their subsequent use in crimes.

Figures for 2000 to 2004 show that 1,300 firearms — including 961 shotguns, 271 rifles and 28 pistols — were stolen from legal owners.

But Mr Crofton said there was “no connection at all” between legal guns and criminal use of guns.

“Most legally held firearms are useless to criminals. They have far better and far more powerful firearms available to them.

“Shotguns, which are then sawn off, are the only gun used. Most of them used are stolen from private homes, but that does not make legal gun owners suppliers of criminal classes.”

He said these issues had been addressed in the Criminal Justice Act 2005, which, he stressed, firearm representative bodies supported.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said eight other sections of the act in relation to legally-held weapons had already been commenced. He said that as of March 2006, there were over 213,000 legally held weapons, including 174,475 shotguns, 48,424 rifles and 560 handguns.

In response to garda concerns regarding a rise in applications for licences for handguns, Mr Crofton said the rise was because they were only legal from 2001, after he took a case to the High Court. He accepted handguns would be more attractive than other firearms to criminals who might want to steal them.

But he added: “The vast majority of handguns are sporting firearms; they are not the sort of firearms criminals would be interested in. [Criminals] can use semi-automatic machine guns and fully-automatic pistols out of their drug shipments. The country is awash with criminal guns, they don’t need ours.”