FYI
In this peaceful, crime free country of Great Britain where our police are unarmed and naughty pistols/handguns are banned,..... target shooting, pest/varmint control and humane livestock destruction are the pimary allowable reasons for having a firearms certificate... use for self-defence is not allowed unless you are a high ranking politician or ex-govt minister who has pissed off somebody.
The only pistols allowed are muzzle loaders cap'n'ball type, and only because they slipped up in the wording of the law. Rifle and shotgun is the predominant legal 'shooters' tool. The criminal fraternity have the choice of gun,knife or club, although there have been some
notable cases of the use of semi/auto machine pistols lately and quite a number of City Police Forces are 'suiting-up'as standard.
The 'swat' or Armed Response guys here rush about with H&K carbines, having lost favour with handguns.
The biggest non-terrorist murder toll so far is by a friendly Doctor called Shipman who took out 215 people between 1975 and 1992 and favoured the hypodermic syringe rather than lead projectile.
There are moves afoot now to ban all replica guns, and 'de-acts' whilst CO2 powered pistols are now required to be registered.
The killing of 17 people at Dunblane in Scotland resulted in the loss of UK handguns, and a controversial 100-year secrecy ban imposed on police reports dealing with the man responsible for the massacre. That has since been lifted after much campaigning , and revealed a report compiled by Paul Hughes, then a detective sergeant with Central Scotland police, into Hamilton's activities at a summer camp in Loch Lomond in 1991, five years before he carried out the shootings. The report advised that Hamilton should face prosecution over "incidents" at the summer camp and that his gun licence should be revoked. The police took no action and the Chief Constable renewed that firearm permit annually for the next five years... After the incident, the Chief Constable retired....
The only other name I'll mention is that of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for 5 years shooting dead a teenage intruder at his remote farm in 2000. It is clearly not reasonable to blast them at close range with a shotgun, even when there are two of them and one of you and it is the middle of the night. Nor is it reasonable to stab them to death, even if they are wielding a jemmy, as Barry Lee-Hastings discovered when jailed for five years at the Old Bailey for killing an intruder. Rigging up a booby-trap shotgun on your Ayrshire smallholding may sound reasonable to a man counting the cost of repeated break-ins, but it will get you seven years behind bars - as Frank Gillingham can testify. The law, however, believes it is perfectly reasonable for a career criminal such as Fearon (only wounded) to sue Martin for £15,000 damages or to be released from prison after serving only five-and-a-half months of an 18-month sentence for heroin dealing.