Is it safe to leave my shotgun in the car?

Q: I travel quite a lot for my shooting and stay at a number of different hotels, some of which refuse to have guns on the property. Is it okay, legally, to break the gun in two, leaving one half in a locked car, and take the other into my room in a suitcase?

A:

Unless you can put the gun in a proper security container it is always desirable that it is broken down into at least two parts, so as to prevent loss of the whole.

Keeping the fore-end on your person and leaving the barrel in one place and the action in another is a sensible solution to your problem. Even if the hotel doesn’t mind guns being kept in rooms you must still not leave it all in one piece.

Lock the car

The official guidance is that for short periods of absence from the vehicle any guns in it should be stowed out of sight and the car locked with the alarm (if fitted) set.

A key component such as the fore-end or bolt should always be removed from the gun and kept with you at all times.

Sadly cars are often broken into in car parks and several people have come to grief through not removing a key component. In these circumstances you may find yourself being treated more as a criminal than as a victim of crime.