8 Nov 17 – The minister publicly driving the 50-cal ban has confessed to Parliament that the one stolen rifle which prompted the latest drive to ban 50-cal rifles was, in fact, recovered by police.

Nick Hurd MP, the Conservative Home Office minister steering the 50-cal and MARS bans through Parliament, admitted in a Parliamentary answer that no 50-cal rifles have been used in crime in the UK.

He added that the one “criminal incident” involving a 50-cal rifle was a theft, and added that the firearm “was subsequently recovered”.

Police lobby agency NABIS’ “chief scientist”, Martin Parker, was tasked to find a way of banning 50-calibre rifles by the police Firearms and Explosives Licensing Working Group. FELWG is the police group which decides what firearms laws will say and how they are enforced and interpreted. It stopped publishing meeting minutes when its parent company, ACPO, rebranded itself as the College of Policing, in order to evade an order from Theresa May that the unaccountable ACPO private business, owned for personal gain by senior police constables, was to be shut down.

Parker was given this job in the wake of the Paris mass murders of 2015, which was the trigger for the EU gun ban.

NABIS, the National Ballistic Intelligence Service, presents itself to the public as a ballistics lab that analyses bullets and firearms misused by criminals. In reality, NABIS is a police weapon deployed to secure changes in firearms laws targeting the licensed firearms community. It uses its pseudo-scientific approach to browbeat civil servants and politicians into changing the law and making it harder for legitimate shooters and collectors to enjoy their peaceful hobbies. NABIS works hand-in-glove with the dozen or so Home Office civil servants whose specialism is firearms law.

NABIS is responsible for recent changes to laws on antique firearms, which the Home Office itself confessed will save a theoretical one life per year. Fewer than 10 people have been shot dead through the misuse of antique firearms over the past ten years; all of these were criminal gang members.