9 Oct 2017 – Shooters can cost Home Secretary Amber Rudd her Parliamentary seat if her plan to ban “rapid-fire rifles” and .50″ rifles goes ahead, UKSN can reveal.

Earlier this month the Home Office announced a “crackdown” on sales of various items. Most of the “crackdown” is just repeating current laws and makes no practical difference. However, tacked on the end were plans to ban “rapid fire rifles” and rifles chambered in .50″.

Amber Rudd is the MP for Hastings and Rye, in East Sussex. Her majority is just 346 votes, with the Labour candidate for the seat finishing an extremely close second.

Meanwhile, Sussex Police had 22,391 FACs and SGCs on issue, according to 2016 figures compiled by UKSN. Firearm and shotgun certificate holders alone can easily unseat Rudd at the next General Election by changing their votes.

A quick look at Google reveals at least three rifle clubs are based in Hastings alone – the 1066 Rifle & Pistol Club, Target Shooting Hastings (formerly known as Hastings Smallbore RC), and Hastings & St Leonards R&PC. A BASC-affiliated shotgun shoot, the Romney Marsh Association for Shooting and Conservation, is also based on the far side of the constituency’s eastern boundary.

Certificate holders (and rifle club members who may not be certificate holders themselves) have it in their power to halt the gun bans – in fact, any threatened gun bans during the life of this Parliament – by writing to Rudd and threatening to vote for her Labour rival unless she withdraws her plans and reigns in her civil servants and police employees.

The current ban plan seems to have been sneaked into the Home Office announcement simply because someone decided they could get away with it, rather than being based on evidence of any threat or harm. .50 rifles owned by certificated target shooters have never been used in any crime in Great Britain.

UKSN urges East Sussex shooters in Rudd’s constituency to start writing to their MP immediately, urging her to drop the ban plan completely on threat of being sacked at the next general election. With the political landscape as uncertain as it has been over the last couple of years – particularly with this year’s snap poll – there is no telling when the next general election might happen.