Opposition anger over latest delay to national gun register

THE failure to roll out a national firearms register nine years after the Dunblane massacre was labelled a scandal yesterday, as the Home Office revealed it had missed yet another deadline for implementing the list.

Peers, opposition MPs and MSPs said the government was leaving people exposed to a repeat of the tragedy - in which 16 schoolchildren were shot dead - without proper scrutiny of more than one million private firearm owners in Britain.

Although the register is only for England and Wales, it will affect Scotland as police forces north of the Border, who have their own register, will be able to tap into the system.

Yesterday, politicians in Westminster and Holyrood said the delays were unacceptable.

Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords, accused the Home Office and police of dragging their feet in implementing the register, having opposed it from the start.

"We have got a government that is going to put us all on ID cards and that is going to track every car on every road in the land, and yet it can't put gun owners on a database," he said.

Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice spokesman for the Scottish National Party, said the delays underlined why "all gun legislation should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament".

Rather than trying to address a Scottish problem through Westminster, the Executive should have the jurisdiction over gun crime, he said. "What we need is action. What we cannot have is an ongoing hiatus which puts people at risk of being either injured or killed."

Pilot tests of the scheme in Lancashire and London were hampered by technical glitches when the DNA database would not link up with the criminal records database. Trials will not restart until next month and the Home Office could not tell The Scotsman how long they would run for.