It's a long, boring, and onerous process. It requires filling in a long application form, which must be collected from and returned to your parish hall, by hand. It requires three photos of yourself to hand in to the cops, as well as two separate forms from two "referees" who have lived in the Island for at least two years. It also demands that you pay £45 for the parish to process your application - which can be refused - and if you've been in jail for more than three years (a sentence you can potentially pick up for selling a bit of weed to your mates), you're banned from possessing any type of firearm for the rest of your life.
You've also got to repeat this process every five years.
You'd think this was restrictive enough on an island where serious violent crime is practically non-existent and 10,000 guns are in the hands of private citizens without any real incidents for decades.
Sadly, our gun-grabbing politicians aren't so convinced. I'd hoped that after Deidre "I don't know" Mezbourian, the former Assistant Home Affairs minister who promised to tighten restrictions earlier this year, was left to gather dust at the head of the Comité des Connétables, gun owners would get a bit of a break. Or so I thought, because this week, Simon Crowcroft, local poet, mediocre dramatist and sometime Connétable de St. Hélyi, has demanded that prospective gun owners or people looking to re-apply for their license stump up more cash.
It seems shit by any name really does smell the same.
Crowcroft's rationale here is cloaked in the thinnest of thin excuses. According to the good Connétable, his own parish - St. Helier - is having to process so many licences that, unlike any other parish, he has to hire a part-time firearms officer to deal with the number of applications, which is making the costs involved in processing said applications too high.
A quick look at an FOI request from 2017 reveals this to be absolute bollocks and less of an indication of problems in the system so much as a problem of Crowcroft's honorary police being a bit useless. According to "Firearm Ownership (FOI)", issued 28th of September 2017, St. Helier currently has 180 active firearms certificates. By contrast, St. Brélades has 175 and St. Ouen has 153. It's worth a reminder at this point that these certificates are only issued once every five years.
The problem here is that St. Helier's honoraries aren't able to do the same job that their counterparts in Brélades or over here in good old St Ouën and require the service of a part-time firearms officer. Yet, Crowcroft's solution seems to be that, instead of just using his honorary police correctly, he wants to bump up the cost of people's firearms certificates depending on how many weapons they possess, the result being that competition shooters and suchlike get penalised for happening to own a larger collection of sporting equipment than someone who isn't so experienced. Crowcroft has also indicated that he'd be interested in raising the cost of certificates in general. Guns are only for rich people, amirite?
The parish should not be penalising gun owners because Simon Crowcroft cannot manage his system properly.
Perhaps he should stick to poetry instead.
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