As predicted, the airgun licencing programme north of the border is slowly making the transition from farce to fiasco. There are estimated to be half a million airguns in private hands in Scotland, of which as of last month less than one per cent were licenced. Even allowing for that half a million figure being wide of the mark by, say, 50%, at the current rate it will be at least four years before the job is anywhere near complete. None of this has stopped the police hailing the process as a resounding success, leaving us to wonder what sort of mind numbing disaster it would have to be in order for them to describe something as a failure.
One of those doing the hailing is Chief Superintendent Barry McEwan. McEwan rejoices in the title of Head of Safer Communities (oh, please, if you are going to have ludicrous job titles, then at least make them grammatically correct), a title which presumably he feels empowers him to speak on the behalf of them. Here’s what he said about the airgun issue: “Communities have felt enabled and felt this is the right thing to do. They understood the danger that air weapons bring to our communities in Scotland”. Apart from wondering exactly what McEwan meant by communities “feeling enabled” (by whom or by what?) the most pressing question is how the Chief Superintendent actually knows what the communities thinks or feels.
Perhaps he has carried out a survey in each of the communities falling within his bailiwick, because surely only in this way could he then presume to speak on their behalf. If he has gone from house to house canvassing opinion on the issue then he is duty bound to make the findings public. For certainly all the surveys conducted before the introduction of the licencing system suggested that where they did not actually oppose the new law (and that included many voices within the police service who did), the people of Scotland (or communities as Barry McEwan would have it) were indifferent to the whole process. If, then, the officer does not have empirical evidence to support his statements, perhaps in future he could qualify what he has to say, because let’s face it, communities start to feel very unsafe indeed when those charged with their protection state as fact, that which is only opinion.