FOI request reveals 21 gun licences revoked since Plymouth shooting

Time Well Spent June 15, 2022

Following up on conflicting news coverage, a Freedom of Information request reveals that Devon and Cornwall Police revoked a total of 21 gun licences in the wake of the Plymouth shooting

Back in early November, we published a news article titled “Are thousands of gun licences being revoked, or is it just eight?” The article looked at conflicting mainstream news coverage of firearms and shotgun licence revocations in the wake of the Plymouth shooting.

To briefly recap, The Express ran a sensationalised story with the headline “Thousands of guns seized after August mass shooting”, while just one day later, The Telegraph published its own coverage of the developments with the headline “Just eight gun licences revoked in wake of Plymouth shooting”.

The Express claimed boldly in its first paragraph that “Police sources say up to 40 guns a day are being seized in Devon and Cornwall alone, with forces nationwide replicating those efforts and reviewing licences.”

In order to clarify the matter and bring to you some hard facts you can rely on, we sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Devon and Cornwall Police Firearms Licensing department, asking them to clarify exactly how many licences they had revoked since the Plymouth shooting.

We now have a response from Devon and Cornwall. The Telegraph was an awful lot closer to the real figure than The Express (go figure!), and considering our response came a full month after they published their article, it’s certainly possible that they were correct at the time.

According to our own information, since the Plymouth shooting, a total of five firearms licences and 16 shotgun licences have been revoked by Devon and Cornwall Police, bringing the total in those counties to 21 to date. We do not have details of the circumstances under which these were revoked.
We hope that’s cleared the matter up for now!