Just dig this up a bit, it's not to old though - hope no one minds.

My AWL also came up for renewal. It wasn't just granted this time round.

On the one hand, if they're going to do it, they may-as-well do it properly and check up on answers to questions, on the other, it still don't think it deters airguns being in the wrong hands. (Although how often are airguns used in crime anyway? But that's not my point/question.)

I only shoot with Scouts, we offer it as an activity about once every two or three months.

I filled out the renewal, nothing to report there. But this time they wanted to check out where I shoot. (I can't remember what I said first time round.) We have a range set up in our scout hall, (it's our building, not hired or anything). The range is not permanent. We also have some land down in the Borders, but that's not fully on line yet. They came down to look at the set up - I checked to see what groups did elsewhere, and based out set up on that. There was a comment about it not being ideal - but it's a scout hall, not a full time shooting range, and with the best will in the world, we're not shooting live ammunition.

They advised that I apply for a club license, they said my AWL license didn't cover shooting as an activity for Scouts. They said, rather than apply for an event licence every time we did it, a club license would cover us.

We're not a shooting club though. We seem to fall through the cracks. Apparently, if we were for-profit, an individual's AWL would cover recreational shooting, but we're not for-profit so...

The club form isn't arduous to fill out it's much the same as the individual AWL form, but my question would be - has anyone else come across this? I know there are scout activity centres that offer shooting as an activity, are they running 'shooting clubs' too?

This is a bit niche, but I wondered if anyone else had come across this.


PS: I would say, the officers were keen for the activity to run, they absolutely weren't being oppositional about it. I think they were 'interpreting' the AWL legislation as best they could too - it's not well written, at least, not for our circumstances.