Urban Myths

Whenever our sport receives deceptive or misleading coverage in the mainstream media, the Countryside Alliance are on hand to dispel the myths and provide journalists with the facts

 

- Tim Bonner

As a stickler for statistics, the annual release of the number of firearm and shotgun certificate holders in England and Wales by the Home Office is always enjoyable (statistics from Northern Ireland and Scotland are not made public but are available on request). The numbers are quite incredible and show the strength of the shooting community across the board.

To give you an overview, as of March 2017, there were 154,958 firearm certificate holders in England and Wales, with 559,302 individual firearms covered by those certificates. As of the same date, there were 561,413 shotgun certificate holders accounting for 1,349,099 individual shotguns. Taking into account the overlap of those with both firearm and shotgun certificates, that leaves over 600,000 certificate holders in England and Wales alone.

The last statistics in Northern Ireland recorded over 63,000 firearm certificate holders (Northern Ireland only has firearms certificates covering both shotguns and firearms), and in Scotland over 80,000 shotgun certificate holders and 15,000 firearm certificate holders were recorded.