Azure-Supernova said:
This is why it was a good idea to introduce this legislation for the UK:
"Unrealistic imitation firearms (IF's) must be more than 50% transparent, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright blue, bright green, bright pink or bright purple or have dimensions of no more than a height of 38 millimetres and a length of 70 millimetres (as defined in the Home Office regulations for the VCRA)"
If the weapon is a close enough imitation of the real thing then I'm pretty sure the law stipulates that it's going to be treated as such.
Even so you can still acquire fairly realistic guns here by legal means through a sports gun store (Stores for selling air rifles and such) as a collector of air rifles and an avid target shooter I've seen plenty of gun stores in Briton and not one of them had anything that was transparent or coloured outside of blank guns.
The one I currently own looks like this:
Given that it is under 8.5 joule (the gun is 3 joule) you don't even require a license to own it. You can simply walk into a local air rifle store and buy one and take it home that same day (as I did) granted you've got to have photo I.D on you first and they tend to put you on their data base. However its still reasonable easy to purchase a fairly realistic looking pellet pistol in this country. Personally I wish they'd put a license on anything that looks like this because idiots have free access to them and do stupid things with them that give legitimate hobbyist like myself and my cousin a bad name.
As for the incident, I cannot blame the police here. Usually when it comes to stuff like this you can find something controversial and often people look for it as a means of "fuck the police" however in this article fairly few have been able to point anything like that out and those arguments have been quickly quashed due mainly to ignorance of how fire arms or police procedure works.
They had no choice from the looks of it, having been round quite a few of these pellet guns (if you've seen the pic above of my firearm you should know how realistic it looks to even the trained eye) I know how real they can seem and outside of close inspection they'd look like a firearm and should be treated as such. If I went around waving my handcannon on a school ground and at the police I'd expect to be shot dead and I wouldn't blame them.
As for words of "shoot to wound" there's no such thing. First of all its near impossible, if you've never shot anything closely resembling a gun then you might not be as savvy on the subject however, unlike in movies or video games, they don't tend to go exactly where you point it. They get affected by wind, recoil, drop, the sight may not be 100% accurate, your hands aren't completely steady trying to hit a limb which tend to be fairly skinny compared to the rest of your body is extremely difficult.
Now take into account that these limbs are moving and waving around, so not only are they small targets, they're also moving targets. You can easily miss, causing the shooter to panic and fire, also, the bullet that didn't hit as to go somewhere, it will hit a hard surface and bounce off, hopefully losing power and stopping, or it will hit something soft and gooey like another human. Its not worth the risk.
You aim for the center mass cause its far easier to hit, even if you're bullet doesn't go exactly on the mark you intended, unless your aim is really off or your a pathetic shot, its going to hit the target somewhere in the center area.
I can't exactly vouch for the whole 3 shot thing though from what I've heard from people that have had the unfortunate task of shooting someone, people don't tend to go down in one hit unless your packing something seriously heavy. One shot may be enough to kill someone, however it could take anything from minutes to days for that to happen, in the mean time he could be shooting you. So you need to shoot until you put them down. Excessive force would have been if they went to the fellows wounded body and started to unload the whole clip point blank in the face.
There's my two pence on it all.
