Easier for police to track scrap metal than guns '“ '˜aghast' judge

Judge Richard Bond said it was “extraordinary” there was no central electronic register in the UK that would allow police to “almost instantaneously” find a gun by serial number.

He was also “aghast” at evidence of the sometimes “lax attitude” of UK border staff towards checks on imports of out-dated guns, and called for the rules to be “tightened”.

In wide-ranging remarks as he sentenced rogue gun dealer Paul Edmunds to 30 years in prison, Judge Bond said “particular matters” needed bringing to the authorities’ attention.

At Birmingham Crown Court, he said it was “not an exhaustive list of criticisms” and that he hoped “certain MPs” could discuss with the police how best to tackle the legal issues.

The comments came as he jailed Edmunds, of Hardwicke, Gloucestershire, whose guns and home-made bullets were linked to 107 crime scenes, including three murders.

The 66-year-old, a registered firearms dealer, was convicted after a retrial for conspiracy to supply guns and ammunition between 2009 and 2015, and other firearms offences.

Judge Bond told Edmunds he had been “the lynchpin to this conspiracy and without you it could not have been carried out”.

The judge praised the police’s painstaking work in continuing to trace hundreds of firearms still unaccounted for.

While 17 pistols criminally-linked to Edmunds have been taken out of circulation, police said of the 280 guns imported between 2009 and 2015, the whereabouts of 207 remained a mystery.

Meanwhile, officers have recovered about 1,000 of his hand-crafted rounds from crime scenes, but shells were “still coming in” more than two years after Edmunds’ arrest.

The tendrils of his cottage-based manufacturing operation spread nationwide, linking his work to crime scenes in West and South Yorkshire, as well as the West Midlands, London, Greater Manchester, and Derbyshire.

Edmunds side-stepped UK laws on importing old guns for which ammunition was commercially available, by falsely declaring to the authorities in customs paperwork they were obsolete “antiques”. The guns, whose importation is subject to complex rules, were not checked in any detail at UK customs.

Judge Bond urged a crackdown on weapons “easily converted” into handguns, and the use of “extension bars” on pistols that allow their legal classification to be changed.

“Unfortunately it takes just one person, as this case shows, to act in breach of the trust placed in them,” he said.

“Death and mayhem follows.”