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Up to 50 handgun owners to mount legal challenges over licences
14 February 2010 By John Burke Public Affairs Correspondent
The state is facing up to 50 legal challenges by the owners of high-calibre handguns who are seeking to have licences issued, despite being refused approval by Gardaí.
The National Association of Regional Game Councils (NARGC), which is the country’s largest gun-owners’ lobby group, plans to launch the challenges after successfully challenging two refusals by a senior garda to issue licences for handguns.
Des Crofton, national director of the NARGC, which has 28,000 members across Ireland, said the association’s members had encountered ‘‘totally unacceptable behaviour’’ by some senior gardaí in their refusal to issue handgun licences to previously-licensed shooters.
Crofton said that the association would be challenging the implementation of the state’s new firearms licensing system, which he said had descended into ‘‘mayhem’’.
He said that he would be instructing the association’s solicitors, William Egan and Associates, to place advertisements in shooting magazines, in which the NARGC will seek expressions of interest from claimants who were refused handgun licences.
There are believed to be as many as 500 firearms, including handguns for competition shooting, which come under the ‘restricted’ category in the new licensing regime, for which gardaí are obliged to take special care in issuing licences.
The NARGC led a successful challenge to the state’s former gun licensing policy between 2002 and 2006, in which it challenged refusals to issue handgun licences under a regime which had existed since the 1970s.
Those legal challenges paved the way for the issuing of more than 1,700 handgun licences to shooting enthusiasts, competition shooters and gun club members in the past three years. Last week, a District Court in Kerry overturned the refusal by a Garda chief superintendent to grant a certificate for six powerful handguns to a father and son for target shooting.
Superintendent John Kerin had argued in court that there were too many high-calibre handguns in the state, which were not suitable for target practice and posed a risk to national security if stolen.
However, the judge overturned the refusal, on the basis that the men had said they required the firearms for competing in international sporting competitions.
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