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Shooting community helps improve shotgun licensing

BASC has revealed the results of its appeal to the shooting community to help improve firearms and shotgun licensing forms.

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Given the choice of two possible formats, BASC says almost 75% of shooters would prefer a conventional form rather than one, which uses optical character recognition (OCR) to ?digitise? handwritten text.

Senior firearms officer, Mike Eveleigh, said: ?Our research also shows that there are major problems in using OCR forms for firearms licensing, not least because they will need to be many pages longer than conventional forms.?

?I have asked for a meeting with the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the police E-commerce group to present our findings, and to discuss the opportunities that electronic applications offer us.?

?We must not forget that many people do not have a computer or Internet connection, so we must have suitable paper forms as well. The input from this poll will help greatly.?