My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but this is about the purpose of the Bill. What are we trying to achieve? Is it to make the public safer? The arbitrary figure of 13,600 joules cannot make the public safer. We are talking about law-abiding sport enthusiasts who have been through all the processes, as has been discussed this afternoon. Are we saying that 13,599 joules is okay, but 13,601 joules is not? It makes no sense. It is not just .50 calibre rifles either; it is exactly the same for .357 Lapua Magnum rifles. It does not matter if someone home loads, as my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, and lowers the velocity of the round, because the Bill is framed so that what matters is not what they put through a firearm but what the firearm is capable of delivering.
I am afraid that the public safety test in the Bill does not cut it. A .22 rifle can remove life and has a much lower velocity. Families often introduce their young ones to the sport of firearms shooting—target shooting, plinking around the farm—with .22 rifles or air rifles, but a person can still lose their life from a .22. What, then, are we trying to achieve? What arguments and evidence base has the Home Office used to advance these provisions? I do not think they have any, and neither do sporting enthusiasts throughout the country. There has never been any discernible or detected use of rifles of this calibre, legally held, in the commission of a crime.
Some mention was made of the Northern Ireland provisions that allow us to access handguns and other firearms that people cannot access in the rest of the UK. That is true. Several Members of this House are in that position. Every time a person purchases a firearm of that capacity—handgun size, whether a 9 mm, a .40 calibre, a .45 ACP, or whatever—they must first apply for permission and show justifiable grounds for having one and then, shortly after purchasing it, hand it in to the police. They then take it away and put it through forensics and ballistics testing so that if that legally held and approved firearm were ever used and in the commissioning of, or during, a crime and the case left where it was used, the ballistics report would tell the police that it was that person’s firearm.