7.3 Heritage?

[majex45]

[QUOTE=tacfoley;5357210]Sir - I asked a simple question, and did not expect to get a patronising response.
I'm not sure we are patronising you, it certainly wasn't my intention. What you must realise is that you cannot shoot your pistol like you used to do. There are restrictions, put on the owner by the Home Office, such as no competition for example.

I asked, how do ordinary law-abiding shooters actually to get to shoot their historical firearms?
You have to store your pistols at a Designated Site, there are about half a dozen in the country (Bisley, Bedford, Herts & Essex for example) Or, more to the point, how do law-abiding shooters first obtain suitable handguns of historical interest and fulfil their desires to shoot them? You need to purchase them off a specialized dealer in section 5aba pistols. They have to be delivered to the designated site by a S5 dealer or carrier. You may not take them home, or indeed, out of the site at all.

Like, it seems, many of you actually do.
Yes, there are about 30 regulars at the Bisley shoots, which are organised by an offshoot of the HBSA and another club that organise their own shoots. You will need to check how other sites arrange their shooting days.

After handing in a large number of handguns back in 1987, only to find a couple of years later that many of them would have qualified as historical firearms, At the risk of sounding patronising, had you bought and read a copy of the Firearms Act, you would have known about 7(3). Although I had to instruct the NRA about section 7 as they had no idea I, too, might care to spend some of my hard-earned military pension on some of the guns I used to shoot freely, but without the necessity of getting on a couple or airplanes to do it.

It still seems to me to be a chicken and egg situation - as a shooter of Swiss and Swedish classic rifles, I would like to have a collection of Swiss and Swedish classic handguns, too, but not just to look at. As a collector of Swiss rifles you should be able to qualify as a collector of Swiss pistols. The Act requires that both the owner (collector) AND the firearm qualify. If you specialisation is Swiss pistols you could have the Luger type and the Petter/SIG pistols. There is no cut off date on S7(3) but it gets progressively harder to justify pistols as they get newer. It is VERY hard to get a pistol made after 1998

If your friend who collects target pistols has Jurek Free Pistol #2 - There are Jureks in the collectionTHAT was mine. So was the 1936 Walther Olympia with all the accessories... There is at least one and possibly two in the collection.
By the way, if you are a life member of the NRA (I assume NRA of GB) and assuming you have asked them, then why haven't they offered any advice, after all, they charge enough.