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(full disclosure - I'm posting this with my journo hat on)

I have been told that North Yorks police have written to all FAC and SGC holders asking them to write back and tell them what firearms and shotguns they currently hold. You can speculate exactly why they might be doing this, and I'm rather keen to find out.

If you're covered by North Yorks and have a copy of the letter which you'd be willing to share, please PM me here or email me at work: gcorfield@theregister.co.uk

I will not do anything to disclose your identity publicly unless you're happy for me to do so.

Who in their right mind would reply?

My local team called me asking the same...turns out they never put my firearm purchases into their system but they found out/suspected i owned some. No drama, I again emailed them the details and we moved on. I could prove that I supplied the information first time around but they were fine with my word on that.

Should point out I don't want to publish the letter/s - just need to see it myself to confirm it's what I think it might be, and not a case like TJC's above.

Gaz wrote: You can speculate exactly why they might be doing this, and I'm rather keen to find out.

The most obvious reason is that their database has got out of whack with reality. Speaking as someone who has been in the trade, as it were, a good database is about 99% accurate. A really good database is about 99.9% accurate. If we assume that there are about 500,000 firearms legally held in the UK by civilians on FACs then this works out at between 500 and 5,000 errors.

Of course, if we want to speculate a little, it's entirely possible that during an upgrade the whole thing got accidentally deleted and they didn't have a backup (trust me, this happens too) and they literally have no information at all.

Cheers,

The Other Gaz

PS - Just saw the email address. I read "The Register" every day without fail. Kudos.

Ha! I didn't realise you wrote articles for El Reg! Good stuff :)

Ta - am a sub-editor rather than a writer at El Reg, so I spend most of my working days writing headlines, selecting pictures and tweaking copy. But every now and then I write the occasional piece myself...

But back to the point, anyone from North Yorks been asked to tell them what they're holding??

Apparently this is happening in South Yorks too. A few of the members of the club I'm joining were talking about it at the weekend.

My FEO told me all firearms info was held on the Police National Computer, but can one force break their bit of that? Seems a tad odd to me.

Perhaps there was a pile of paper somewhere containing details yet to be entered on the PNC, and said pile of paper got mislaid.

Warwickshire Plod phoned the Sett a few months ago and asked if I could supply them the same information - it seems that an upgrade to their system had turned out to be anything but and all my data had been lost. Not heard anything from them recently though...