#paulclarke - what SHOULD have happened

At the risk of this becoming, temporarily, a single-issue blog, CF has more to share. Over the weekend there was a twitter storm over Paul Clarke, who found a gun, took it to his local police station and was arrested and now faces five years in prison.

Holly Thompson, the journalist who was actually in court for this case, and who wrote the original Surrey Mirror piece, pointed some of the people asking her endless twitter-questions at the Home Office's 'Firearms Policing Guidelines'

Since this is a PDF file of some 212 pages, CF has not quite finished reading it but Paul Walter over at Liberal Burblings has done his homework.

He found - on page 129, dear god - this highly relevant passage:

"Anyone surrendering an illegally held firearm should be questioned discreetly with a view to establishing its history but, unless circumstances exist to give serious cause for concern as to its provenance (for example, if it appears to have been stolen), the person handing it in should not be pressed.

The emphasis should be on creating an environment in which people hand in illegally held firearms"

So, given that, taken from an official fucking Home Office guidelines document, the perennial question "What The Fuck Is Going ON?" can only be raised once more.

In other relevant news, Stu at Sharpes's opinion can just be heard - over the deafening din of reverse gear being engaged - asking whether:

"..Chief Superintendent Adrian Harper who Paul Clarke met with before being arrested is the same Chief Superintendent Adrian Harper who was suspended for alleged dishonest conduct in May 2009?"

Well, unless there are several 'Chiefs' in Surrey with the same name, it would seem so.


The plot continues to thicken.

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