WE SAY

Lead. It has been the defining debate of my tenure at Gun Trade News so far: to steal a David Bowie line: “We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot.”

As things stand now, despite the headlines, we still don’t actually have five years to a lead ban, simply a proposal on the table that we might get five years once the Secretary of State finally enacts the HSE’s latest proposals. And that enactment is not going to happen until we have had another round of consultations.

Surely a large part of the consultations that major manufacturers will be providing at this point is that, added to the war still going on in Ukraine, we now have a very unstable situation in the Middle East, and that any retooling of production lines undertaken during such a period of turmoil would be madness, no matter what we suggested a few short months ago.

It’s an outside horse, but if we were taking bets I would say it may well be ten years before we actually see a lead ban on the statute books. Which is all well and to the good.

As an industry, I accept that we don’t actually want a lead ban and the ensuing difficulties it would bring. However I’m pretty sure we will get a ban one day, and I can’t help but wonder if the sensible thing for the industry now would be to accept a five-year window from the spring, just to get some certainty on board. For without certainty, planning is impossible.

I feel like I have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about and writing about lead, so for those of you with a major financial stake I can only imagine the wringer you have been through, and continue to endure while the flip-flopping continues.

On the other hand, the news for airguns is unremittingly terrific. Already a booming sector in our trade—thanks in large part to its unregulated nature—it doesn’t take a genius to predict a very strong future for airgunners of all sorts, especially now that they likely won’t have to comply with a lead ban. I was interested to read Mike Hurney’s thoughts on the sector on page 20 of this issue, I suspect this will only have deepened his ambitions for airguns. We should all sit up and take note.

Steve