Category: News

Anyone who is considering owning a gun needs to make sure they adhere to strict UK legislation when it comes to purchasing, storing and using their firearm.

Find out everything you need to know by reading on:

Shotgun certificate

Firstly, it is illegal to own a gun without an official certificate issued by the police. You can apply for the licence through the government website and require two referees for a firearm certificate and one for a shotgun certificate. 

In order for the police to grant a certificate, they need proof that you will pose no danger to the public or disturb the peace. 

Once issued, they last five years so long as you follow the conditions attached to the certificate and show it when questioned by police.

When you buy a gun, you then need to inform the police force that issued the licence. You need to do the same when selling the firearm and when borrowing a shotgun for more than 72 hours from someone else. 

Storing the firearm

Legal responsibilities for the firearm do not end with acquiring the licence, as you are obligated to keep the gun secure at all times.

When they are not being used, they need to be stored in a safe place so they cannot be accessed by anyone who is unauthorised.

This means keeping it somewhere like a purpose-built gun cabinet that nobody else has keys for. Make sure you also store ammunition away from the gun, preferably in a secure place as well. Cartridges are best to be kept in a cool, dry place out of reach of children. 

While some people purchase these secure cabinets to have in their house, others prefer to use a gun storage facility so their firearm is not kept inside their properties or near their family members. 

This gives them reassurance that someone cannot access their firearm without their knowledge and use it dangerously within their homes.

When you are travelling in a vehicle, it is important to keep the firearms secure, such as in a locked suitcase. 

The car must then be locked when parked and the vehicle should be somewhere you can keep an eye on it at all times. Be extra vigilant by making sure anti-theft devices are set on the motor, and park so it is difficult to enter the part of the car where the gun is being kept. 

For additional security, separate the fore-end of the gun and take this with you when you leave the vehicle. 

Using it safely

It is important to know when you are allowed to use your gun in the UK. In England and Wales, you are not allowed to shoot game on Sundays or Christmas Day, while there is no legal obligation to avoid doing so in Scotland. However, it is an offence to shoot wildfowl in Scotland on Sundays. 

Many animals and birds are protected, which means you can only shoot pest bird species, so long as you have permission from the landowner and are doing it in adherence to your licence. It is important to check what birds are on the pest list so you do not break the conditions of your certificate.

To make sure you are using your gun as safely as possible, it is also worth undertaking an assessment by the BASC called the Safe Shot Award. This quick practical test makes sure you can empty, load and fire a gun safely.

Over the centuries that guns have loomed large over society, hunting and competition, there have been all sorts of unusual guns that have ended up in storage, many of which have unique characteristics that were never widely adopted.

One of the most unusual examples of this in the 20th century is the time when a company produced a revolver that was magazine-fed and used triangular bullets, based on a hodgepodge of mid-20th-century technologies that ultimately went nowhere.

The Dardick Tround was intended to combine the capacity of a semi-automatic pistol with the firing operation of a revolver, using triangular bullet rounds to square the circle and provide the best of both worlds.

Invented by David Dardick and patented in 1958, the Dardick handgun was an open-chamber gun that used non-removable magazines to allow a revolver with only three firing chambers to carry up to 20 trounds at a time.

Unlike a standard revolver, which required the chamber to be open in whole or in part to load ammunition, the Dardick allowed rounds to be inserted from the side as well as be magazine fed.

The revolver was inherently double-action, as the long pull rotated the cylinder, cocked and released the hammer in one motion, loading another bullet from the mag in the process.

By default, the trounds were .38 calibre (equivalent to 9mm), and the initial Dardick Model 1100 could only be chambered with .38 Dardick Trounds.

Later models allowed for multiple calibre options, including .38, .30 (7.62mm) and .22 (5.56mm), as well as a kit that allowed the Dardick to be converted into a somewhat cumbersome carbine,

There were even kits that converted conventional rounds such as the .38 Special into trounds to be loaded.

Whilst the Dardick did not have removable magazines, it could be speed-loaded using stripper clips.

The concept for triangular bullets came from a 1950s US Army experiment. As triangles could fit into less space than round bullets, there were experiments to see if belt-fed triangular clips could work as a more efficient solution.

However, whilst the bullets were half the size of a conventional round cartridge, triangular bullets were much harder to feed from a magazine into a chamber, leading to a lot of guns jamming in the testing process.

The tround did seem, to its credit, to have gotten around this issue, and found a lot of novel ways to fix issues with potential jamming. 

Despite this, however, it never gained any popularity with gun owners, and after selling less than 100 revolvers in four years, Dardick was wrapped up.

Part of the problem was a reliance on plastic cartridges, which warped over time and ultimately jammed the chamber, leading to awkward repairs and maintenance.

Beyond this, it was simply awkward, cumbersome and ugly. Part of the appeal of revolvers is their aesthetics and simplicity, and the Dardick revolver range looked awkward and struggled to appeal to people looking to add either a pistol of any kind to their collection.

Unusual revolvers still exist but the tround experiment has never been repeated, to the point that it is expensive just to fire a single shot.

Firearms are designed using the relatively simple principle of using an explosive powder to fire some type of bullet through a tube and ideally hit a target. Because of this, there have been a lot of different designs since the invention of gunpowder, not all of which have been successful.

One of the most popular examples of a firearm that is interesting in theory and desirable to gun collectors to be kept in storage is the idea of the pistol sword or gunblade.

This is different to a bayonet, a sharp knife designed to be attached to the end of a rifle, as the blade and firearm parts of a pistol sword are far more closely linked and the roles of each component are reversed.

A pistol sword is primarily meant to be used as a close-range bladed weapon, with the pistol part being secondary and designed for close-range purposes where accuracy is less of a concern.

There have been a lot of gunblades of varying designs over the years, many of which are traditional weapons with a gun barrel at the end. Still, the most famous example, the one that tried the hardest to make the concept work and the one that ultimately doomed it to novelty status was the Elgin Cutlass.

Point And Shoot

Inspired by the Bowie knife named after the Texas revolutionary James Bowie, the Elgin Cutlass was designed to be both a gun and a knife, rather than previous attempts which had rather unwieldy and optimistic firing actions.

It featured an 11-inch Bowie knife underneath the barrel of a .54 calibre smoothbore Elgin pistol.

Because the pistol was only single-shot before it needed to be awkwardly reloaded, the blade allowed for the shooter to defend themselves at close range whilst they waited for it to reload.

It was designed and commissioned by the United States Navy for the Wilkes Expedition of 1838 and even saw some use by a landing party to defend sailors from the attack on Malolo, an island near the country of Fiji.

Only 150 Elgin Cutlass Pistols were ever made, and with the benefit of hindsight, it is pretty clear as to why this was the case and why the pistol proved unpopular.

In theory, the idea of a combination knife and gun sounds intriguing as a convenient way to be safe at close or long range, but in practice, weapons like these ultimately provide the worst of all worlds.

It had to be sheathed rather than holstered, was bulky and overly large, was heavy, had a strange and counterproductive centre of gravity for a pistol and a completely unsuitable grip for a knife.

The Elgin Cutlass was relatively unpopular and whilst some of the pistols were still used as late as the Civil War and even ended up in the Frontier West, the weapon proved to be ill-fitting for its purpose.

However, because the concept is so fascinating and the designs so interesting, pistol swords are highly sought after by collectors.

There are different groups of people who will buy guns, and hunters, sport shooters and collectors all have different needs and expectations for their gun storage needs, as well as other specifications for the guns they want to buy.

A gun designed for competition, such as those used at the Olympic Games, is very different to the shotguns and rifles used for hunters, and both of those requirements are different from the decommissioned guns that become collector’s items.

Much like how the medium is the message, the purpose of a gun can often be seen in its design, and nowhere is this more evident than in the bizarre and ambitious failure of the Krummlauf, a curved barrel designed to shoot around corners in the final days of the Second World War.

Why was it made, why did it not work, and has the concept ever been attempted again?

Breaking Barrels And The Laws Of Physics

Practically every gun ever made has a straight barrel for a reason; as it is subject to the incredibly intense forces of explosions and metal bullets firing out the chamber, it needs to be as strong and robust as possible to take the forces and retain a consistent launch direction.

As well as this, the barrel often shapes the ballistics and motion of the bullet through the rifling grooves on the bore, allowing for greater stabilisation whilst in flight. 

Given that a straight barrel is so important to the function of a gun that it is practically a foundational requirement, it may seem unusual that a weapons manufacturer would even attempt to make a curved barrel gun.

The ultimate answer is that it was an innovative gamble at the end of one of the biggest wars in history by an army that was all too aware that they were losing.

The Krummlauf (curved barrel) was a variation of the Sturmgewehr 44, the world’s first assault rifle with a German name that translates to the now-ubiquitous term for the primary weapon of armed police and military infantry.

The Krummlauf started development at the same time as the StG 44 was released in 1943, barely two years before the end of the Second World War.

The concept was based on the periscope rifle, a First World War adaptation of the standard military rifle of the year and developed by multiple soldiers largely in parallel with each other.

The idea was that in armed combat, if a soldier was aiming down the sights of their weapon, they were exposed to another soldier aiming, so putting a gun on a periscope allowed for someone to aim a gun without exposing themselves.

A similar concept was later explored with the CornerShot, a close-quarters add-on that turns a service pistol into an adjustable rifle to shoot down corners, but neither system actually used a curved barrel. There is a good reason for this

The aim of the Krummlauf was to protect the sports of a tank not otherwise covered or shoot around corners for infantry.

In both cases, the design simply did not work. The barrel caused the bullet to shatter, reducing accuracy and creating a miniature shotgun spread, and these extreme forces led to a laughably short lifespan for the barrels.

The 45-degree version of the gun lasted just 160 rounds, which theoretically meant that it could break after just five or six reloads depending on magazine, and could shatter in less than half an hour.

Ultimately, the end of the war ended the production of the Krummlauf, although the Soviet Union attempted to adapt the system for use with their PPSh-41 rifles to little avail.

The history of firearms is fascinating, not just because there are so many unusual guns that have become collector’s items that need to be stored securely, but also because they tell a story of the society that made them and the priorities they had at that time.

This is what makes hunting rifles such as the highly collectable pigeon guns so fascinating; there was a time when live sport shooting events were so popular that guns dedicated solely to success in these events were created.

One of the most unusual trends in guns however comes in the era of the bike revolver, and the reason why this is such an oddity is that the guns were collectively known as Velo Dog revolvers.

Cycling And Dogs

Cycling emerged in the 1850s, but it was not until the development of the Rover Safety Bicycle in 1885 that it became a viable way of getting around beyond a very local area.

However, in the early days of cycling, the most common safety accessory a cyclist would have was not a helmet, which would not even be thought about until the death of Lawrence of Arabia but instead was a gun.

Because early velocipedes were so expensive, they became very common targets for highway robbers and therefore having the ability to defend oneself during a time when the police were not necessarily available everywhere to help was important.

Small revolvers became very popular, and even when the price of bicycles dropped so precipitously that they were no longer targets of robbery in the same way, many people continued to carry a revolver with them because man’s best friend turned out to be a cyclist’s greatest nemesis.

Dogs would commonly attack cyclists, either directly or by being so excited by the new transport method that they would get in the way and cause fairly nasty accidents and falls.

Because of this, revolvers were kept around to fend them off, ideally by scaring them with the loud noise but potentially by doing something unthinkable in a modern dog-loving world.

The problem was that even small barreled revolvers could be fairly bulky, they needed to be drawn at speed and the hammer could potentially snag and rip clothes.

This led René Galand’s son Charles-Francois to create the Velo-Dog, a dedicated small barrel, small calibre pocket revolver designed specifically to protect against dog attacks.

It had an internal hammer, making it a double action pistol by design, and featured no trigger guard, so the trigger itself could fold into the weapon’s body.

Initially, it launched a specially created .22 calibre Velo-Dog round, but eventually, this was replaced with a more conventional .22 Long Rifle or .25 Automatic Colt Pistol because ultimately they proved to be cheaper but just as effective.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Velo-dog was surprisingly popular and remained so until the start of the First World War, when the priority moved away from tiny revolvers designed to scare off dogs and towards service revolvers to fight in the war to end all wars.

A gun ends up needing to be decommissioned for a wide variety of reasons, typically in the case of guns that are to be used as props rather than used for hunting or target shooting in line with strict licensing and ownership regulations.

Whilst there are many specifics regarding deactivation and a lot of reasons why an owner might want to render their weapon inoperable, one of the main reasons is that it is not intended to ever be fired again.

One of the most unusual reasons why this might be the case is found in the case of the Gyrojet series, which are not only exceptionally rare but due to having one of the most unusual types of ammunition ever loaded into a gun, one that has a higher cost per shot than almost any other gun ever made.

Micro Rocket Launcher

Technically, the Gyrojet series are not guns in the traditional sense but rocket launchers. Unlike a conventional round, which works by having a hammer strike the primer on the back which lights the propellant which launches the bullet forward, the Gyrojet launches a small gyroscopically stabilised rocket.

The key advantage was that without the combustion gases, there was almost no recoil and no need for a chamber or barrel heavy enough to not simply shatter after firing. 

This means that guns could be considerably lighter, designed with far greater variety and could theoretically be more accurate due to the lack of recoil and strain on the marksman.

The gun was developed by Robert Mainhardt and Art Biehl as a .51 calibre, which would be somewhat unusual and bespoke notwithstanding the fact that it relied on rocket power.

It had a particularly unusual firing quality as well, with the rockets being very slow when leaving the barrel but within 10 metres increasing in velocity to 380 metres per second.

The concept was interesting but unfortunately, the Gyrojet was rushed to the prototyping stage in order to try and get a contract with the United States Army in the wake of their increasing involvement in the Vietnam War.

The concept looked promising and both a carbine and assault rifle were tested, but both were found wanting.

The firing chamber had a number of ventilation ports to aid with relieving the gases from the rockets, but a side effect of this was that the ignition of the Microjet bullets themselves was considerably less reliable in humid air such as that found in the jungle.

Reliability was a massive issue, with complaints that the gun was slow to load, cumbersome, often inaccurate and had a one per cent failure rate at best. The most common issue was misfiring bullets that would fire later.

There was promise in the concept but it was not deemed better than conventional small arms, and it was resigned to being used in films such as You Only Live Twice, becoming a considerable collector’s item in the process.

The problem with any use beyond ornamental is that the one-of-a-kind bullets are very hard to find and very expensive.

If you have a gun that you don’t need or want anymore, you may wonder what to do with it. Some might put it somewhere in the attic or display it on a wall as an ornament. But if it is still live, it may pose a danger in the wrong hands.

This subject could be treated flippantly, rather like the Winchester in the comedy horror film Shaun of the Dead, when the rifle after which the pub is named turns out to still be a live weapon, not a prop gun. But in real life, such a weapon could cause a tragic accident.

Alternatively, such a weapon could fall into the wrong hands, leading to it being used for criminal purposes. These are good reasons to get the gun decommissioned.

Some may be familiar with the term decommissioning in relation to the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s and the quest to remove terrorist guns held by the IRA and Loyalist groups. Eventually, with the Republicans preferring to use the term “put beyond use”, weapons were indeed destroyed.

This is particularly relevant because, amid the very tense negotiations over this issue, Republican leaders would sometimes argue that the best decommissioning agent was “rust”, meaning that if a political settlement could be agreed upon, the guns would fall silent and be unusable in time, without the symbolic sense of ‘surrender’ involved in handing them over.

However, this is factually incorrect, as guns do not just rust and fall apart on their own, at least not for a very long time. If you want to make a gun safe, hiding it in the loft and hoping for the best is not a good idea.

As we have stated before, the process of decommissioning means altering a firearm so that it can never be used as a weapon again. This is what our gun decommissioning service does and it means that whether you want to dispose of the weapon entirely or have it put on display safely, you can do so without risk.

This can also be a legal requirement in some cases, with some gun laws incorporated into UK law when Britain was in the EU still on the statute books. This means that some types of weapons may be illegal to own at all, or only with a licence. Getting a gun decommissioned means you don’t have to spend money on a permit for a gun you will never fire.

A key point to note is that decommissioning doesn’t mean we have to take a big circular saw and cut a gun into lots of little bits, or take its metal parts and melt them down. Instead, we can simply remove those components that would make it a viable weapon capable of discharging a round, while maintaining its appearance.

This is the sort of procedure that can enable guns to be displayed safely in public places like museums, as well as private ones like homes.

By getting your weapon decommissioned, you can be sure you won’t have a dangerous weapon on your hands. That may not have been much use in The Winchester when the zombie apocalypse happened, but in real life, it will make everyone safe.

Given that firearms need to be versatile in order to meet a vast array of different sport and hunting needs, it is perhaps natural that a wide variety of different models are manufactured specially designed to meet these very different requirements, with dedicated gun storage solutions to keep them safe.

One of the most interesting examples of this is the Pigeon Gun, a long-barreled shotgun designed specifically for live pigeon shoots of the type that have been banned in dozens of countries for over a century. Because of this, the guns themselves have become very rare collector’s items.

However, whilst pigeon guns are amongst the rarest and most unusual shotguns out there, there are also several rifle models that have become rare and desirable, either due to high quality, historical significance or sheer strangeness.

Sharps Coffee Mill Carbine

One of the most famous urban legends in the history of firearms, the carbine with a grinder in the stock is exceptionally rare and yet so desirable that bootlegs have been made of it, because of a story that is somewhat more dubious.

The gun was designed by Lieutenant Colonel Walter King of the 4th Missouri State Militia as a modification of a Model 1859 Sharps single-shot carbine, with less than 100 models made between 1864 and 1865.

There was a belief, revived by a New York Times article, that the grinder was specifically designed to grind coffee beans to the point that it has become known as the “Coffee Mill Carbine”, however, this is unlikely to be the case.

Besides the fact that it was terrible at grinding coffee when tested by the NRA Firearms Museum, it is believed to have been used either to grind wheat, corn or black powder for gunpowder.

In any case, it was seen as too heavy and useless an addition.

Ljutic Space Gun

Trap shooting is a popular sport hunting discipline which requires a particular type of shotgun to perform well at, but one of the most desired and expensive trap guns ever made was made in less than a day to impress a friend who just happens to be a representative for Remington.

In 1955, Al Ljutic, owner of Ljutic Industries, received an invite to go trap shooting the next day from AA Reil, who was a field rep for the Remington Arms company, back when it was one of the biggest rifle makers in North America as opposed to going bankrupt in 2020.

Lacking a trap gun but wanting to impress, he designed and built one in a single day, which ended up becoming the Space Gun.

It was a surprisingly impressive and strange weapon, with the unusual feature that it would only fire once the trigger was released, allowing for more accurate shots and less recoil.

Only 200 were ever made, which is the biggest reason why they command incredibly high prices on the collector’s market, besides also being a genuine one-of-a-kind weapon that nobody has tried to replicate since. Even other dedicated trap guns tend to resemble conventional shotguns.

Now that Meteorological summer has begun, there will be many people hoping for improved weather as they set about their summer activities. But while some may find their summertime pleasures in a cricket bat, tennis racket, or a ticket to a major summer music festival, others will find it in a shotgun.

There are various shooting seasons during the year, each linked to a particular kind of creature, with the summer most famously bringing the start of the grouse hunting season on August 12th.

It may be you are only interested in heading to the grouse moors between August and December, or it could be you may expand your pursuits when September 1st rolls around and brings the seasons for shooting ducks, golden plovers, or hares.

Either way, there is much to look forward to. If you have yet to acquire a gun or no longer have one in working condition, now is the time to do it and we have a range of second-hand weapons. But you also need a licence and, crucially, somewhere safe to store it.

Gun storage facilities such as those we offer can help obviate a range of risks. Firstly, there is the danger that a gun might be kept in the home where children or other people without an appreciation of the dangers involved in handling a weapon might get their hands on it.

In addition, there is the matter of security. Even if you have no children at home or your gun is stored somewhere generally quite safe, there is always the risk that a break-in could see it being taken by determined robbers, not least anyone who is such a hardcore criminal that they would be very pleased to get their hands on a gun.

Since this would not just mean you suffering a burglary but could have wider consequences as lawbreakers get their hands on a deadly weapon, these are even stronger reasons to take such a step.

Having your weapon stored safely also means it is well looked after and that can be valuable when the shooting season is over and it is kept both safe and in good condition over the winter. This time can also be used for any repair and maintenance work that’s needed.

Indeed, bringing your gun back to us and our storage facilities can be a very smart move, as it will mean you can get the weapon checked over by experts and any little issues resolved quickly before they become a bigger problem. It also means you will have a gun in perfect working order next time you use it.

Of course, that does not mean your gun needs to be locked away for the whole of the winter and spring; it may be, for example, that you decide to bring it out again because you decide to get involved in another hunting season, such as deer.

With a few weeks to go before the glorious 12th, you can plan ahead knowing there is somewhere very safe to keep your gun when it is not in use out on the hills.