Shotguns in the UK? What CAN you own?

A brief look at the various types of shotguns that you can own in the UK and the certficates (AKA Licences) you need to own them! Which one is your favourite?

[Music] hi guys UK guns here so uh in this video I’m going to be giving you a bit of an overview of shotguns in the UK and the different types of shotgun that you can own in the UK um I’ll also talk a little bit about the sorts of sports that involveed shotguns in the UK but I won’t get too much into that um and obviously I don’t have every type of shotgun that you can own uh I don’t have every caliber those kinds of things I’ll talk about some of the other different types but there’s a there’s a variety of shotguns I’ve got here in front of me that give a pretty good overview of the types of shotguns you can own in the UK um I’ll also briefly talk about licensing most of these shotguns are covered by a section two shotgun certificate um but there is also some sorts of shotguns that fall onto a section one firearm certificate now I won’t get too buried into that because uh I plan to do a whole another video on licensing it’s been on the to-do list for well over a year but um I will get around to it at some point and I’ll talk more about licensing but we will touch on it in this video so uh first off then that’s where we’ll start shotgun certificates in the UK so a shotgun certificate essentially is a license it’s not officially called a license it’s shotgun certificate uh but often referred to as a license and that’s what gives you permission to acquire shotguns in the UK and that comes under section two of the Firearms Act 1968 I won’t get too much into the law it’s very boring um but essentially section two shotgun certificate enables you to own shotguns with a maximum capacity of two rounds like for instance this what’s often referred to as a double barreled uh this is an over under so the barrels are over and under one another or side by side such as this one um all these guns are clear I cleared them beforehand but that’s a section two shotgun so are these and I’ll come on to these why these are in a in a bit but that’s your sort of common s classic shotgun really is your over under your double barrel shotgun over under or side by side uh and that’s a section two shotgun and with a section two shotgun certificate you can purchase those from obviously a registered Firearms dealer or from another person who owns them who’s transferring them to you um pretty easily and to have a shotgun certificate in the UK you just really have to have somewhere to shoot it so could be your local clay pigeon shooting range maybe a club uh or friends land or something along those lines as long as you got some way to shoot it and you’ve got suitable Insurance uh you can apply for a section two shotgun certificate and it’s it’s not a guaranteed yes but so long as you meet the criteria the eligibility criteria you’re pretty guaranteed to get a shotgun certificate Farm certificates are a lot more difficult to obtain and like I say I won’t get too much into those but I I’ll briefly touch on it later um but essentially shotgun certificates uh fairly easy to obtain and once you’ve got that you can then buy within reason as many shotguns as long as the section two shotguns as you like so there’s no real restriction obviously you have to have somewh to safe to stall them so a cabinet um and you have to have room in your cabinet for the shotguns you you want to purchase but unlock a firearm certificate which specifies the particular Firearms you can own and the number of firearms you can own of each type um shotgun certificates don’t do that so once you have a shotgun certificate as long as it’s section two like these where it’s maximum capacity of two rounds you can buy two three five if you like um obviously there may be questions asked if you’re buying large numbers of guns but for the most part if you’re just buying a few different types of guns for the different types of shooting you do that’s absolutely fine and it’s pretty easy as well so we’ll touch on the basic uh types of shotgun that you can find in the UK like I say I don’t have all the calibers here I only have two calibers uh there are others um and there’s lots but the most common being 410 20 gauge and 12 gauge there are others outside of that that’s bigger than 12 gauge there’s obviously smaller ones as well but they’re much less common and 12 gauge is by far the most Comm common the most prolific in the UK um because it kind of it does everything it’s a powerful round um but it’s not too crazy it’s a shotgun at the end of the day um so it’s great for clay pigeon shooting and of course if you’re into hunting as well um but I’ll start off down here so this is a 410 this is uh made by Adler so this is actually a youth shotgun um so this can be for youngsters looking to get into the sport it’s great because it’s very very simple it’s very lightweight because it’s single barreled um it’s polymer so it’s very very light very easy to carry and as you can see it’s a smaller frame so it’s designed for uh smaller individuals like children learning to shoot basically um so this could be like a first gun or someone who’s just getting into the sport and this is chambered in 410 there a single uh Barrel brake action so it breaks open like so um single round goes in there you close it up and then you fire very very simple easy mechanism to use great like I say for first time shooters those kinds of things 410 very low recoiling um obviously does come with it drawbacks doesn’t travel as far doesn’t have as much spread so it can be a little bit more tricky especially if you’re going to like a clay pigeon shoot one of these is going to be a bit harder than using a 12 gauge which got you know further distance that it can travel and bigger spread um but great great little gun so that’s a 410 that’s a single barrel and that’s on a section two shotgun certificate and then coming up from that you’ve got 12 gauge which is this one and this is a over under or double barrel as it’s often referred to so two shots one in there one in there so they go straight into the barrels like so close that up and this is single trigger but you can have double trigger like this one I’ll show you in a sec uh single trigger so you just squeeze that trigger once fires the first Barrel squeeze it a second time fires the second barrel and again that’s the section two shotgun so uh really the reasons for obtaining a section two shotgun certificate is as I said earlier you just got to have somewhere to shoot it so lots of clay pigeon ranges all around the country you can find your local one uh go along for a try out shoot if you if you enjoy it you can apply for your section 2 shotgun certificate get your cabinet and everything and you can go out and buy a first gun like this and these sorts of guns they can cost anything from a couple hundred pounds up to thousands depending on what you want to get and how serious you are about it but your first gun doesn’t have to be anything crazy my first shotgun was a a a lar over under very very similar to this one bit shorter but very similar to to this one cost me 150 quid that was my first gun to get me going um and it’s a lot of fun so it doesn’t have to cost the Earth there’s also things like this so this is another sort of double barreled shotgun but this is side by side because the barrels are mounted uh next to each other but it’s essentially the same thing it’s just older but the rounds going in here close that up but the difference with this one is it has two triggers so each trigger does each Barrel like I say this this gun is empty as you can see so uh pull one trigger for the first barrel and then transition to the next trigger and pull that for the second barrel and that’s it nothing special nothing fancy just an older design but works just as well just takes that little bit of getting used to having to change to another trigger uh to fire the second shot so those are pretty classic 12 gauge shotguns that you get here in the UK you’ll see those at clay pigeon grounds all over the UK um and on shoots pheasant shoots those kinds of things very very common but there are other types of shotgun you can get that still fall under the section two uh shotgun certificate so for instance this one here is a section two shotgun uh the reason why it’s section two is because it’s been modified to still only take uh two rounds so the original magazine tube which is underneath this here um would have taken more than two rounds I think this would have been five don’t quote me on that might might have been less but I think it was five but it gets modified so it can only hold two um and then that makes it section two compliance so this is a section two uh gun now it’s often referred to as a two plus one and the reason for that is because you can have two in the magazine tube which is under here and One in the Chamber which essentially gives you three shots but it’s still section two compliant because it’s two in the magazine tube um and then your third round in the chamber um and again this I mean this is set up as a Target gun because it’s got Target sight on it um so this you might use for something called target shotgun which is essentially shooting target so you might be shooting um targets at various distances uh and using this is slightly different um from using one of those okay cuz this is a pump action shotgun so exactly as you would have probably seen in the movies it’s you pump it to load the rounds into the chamber again this gun is empty I made sure it was clear before hand but essentially you would load rounds in through here this is called the loading gate so this is a snap cap it’s not a live round snap cap that goes in through the loading gate up into the magazine tube and then all you have to do is pump and slide it into the chamber like so you would then obviously shoot and then when you pump again it ejects the empty case and then if you had another round in the magazine tube when you close it it would obviously load the next round so it’s a manual action but um is cycling rounds from a magazine tube into the barrel um quite a good fun not the most practical of things in the world um but again in the UK these are relatively inexpensive this is uh called atrox the company that makes this I think they’re a Turkish company um no sorry it’s Hugo it’s Hugo it’s the model is the atrox Hugo atrox uh Hugo I think are a Turkish company um very cheap I think it was about £300 brand new you can pick them up for less secondhand um but like I said that’s is a a target shotgun so that’s slightly different um but you can get ones that are similar to that I had one very similar before that didn’t have the pistol grip and didn’t have the target sights had bead SES uh and you can use that for clay pige and shooting um but with a red dot on there it’s not ideaal for clay pigeon shooting and then the next one is a semi-automatic shotgun so essentially what semi- automatic means is similar to the pump action you have a magazine tube and the rounds go from the magazine tube into the chamber into the barrel essentially which is where you fire them from but you don’t have to Rack this manually so you don’t have to pump the action to get it into the chamber uh it does that for you when you fire the gun so again gun is clear magazine tube’s empty all right but same thing so put that in through the loading gate into the magazine tube once it’s there you have to obviously get the first round into the chamber so you just [ __ ] it using that cocking handle once it’s in the chamber then obviously you would shoot and it would then eject the empty pacing and load the next round automatically for you and then you would just squeeze the trigger again so again this is two plus one so you can have two rounds in the magazine tube One in the Chamber so you could fire three shots each time you squeeze a trigger fire one round eject the casing and load the next round um so that’s a little bit easier and this is actually this is my clay batterer this is what I use for clay pigeon shooting OB see can fit chokes in there as well so you can get different spread uh for the different types of shooting you might want to do it’s good for any kind of shotgun shooting really it’s got bead sights on it so it just has this little bead at the end there um although it does have like a sort of rail so I think you can put other sights on there but like I say this is my clay Basher so I use this for shooting clays uh it’s a lot of fun uh I like the semi-automatics um they’re fun to shoot um and obviously you just have that Single Barrel um so again that’s a section two shotgun obviously originally when it was made by the manufacturer because it’s got a longer magazine tubes it was probably again a five round I would say magazine Tu but again it’s been adapted for the UK Market to be section to compliance now does that mean that you can’t get one of these with a five round or even a 10 round magazine tube which would come out to probably about there um well actually yes you can but if your shotgun has more than a two round capacity in UK law it comes under a different section of Firearms Act and that’s the section one which is basically like this shotgun here and yes this is a shotgun uh this is uh Crow arms xps2 you may have seen this uh on the channel already it’s a couple of videos I put up uh on this um and this is a shotgun but it’s a magazine fed shotgun so obviously because it’s magazine fed the capacity is more than two rounds and because even if you had a two round magazine you can get obviously bigger magazines this is a five round magazine I also have an eight round magazine and you can get drum mags and stuff as well and so therefore the capacity exceeds the two round capacity for section two shotguns which means that this comes under section one of the Firearms Act and essentially what that means is rather than a shotgun certificate you need a section one firearm certificate to own a section one shotgun um so how would you obtain one of those well again like I said I’m not going to go too much into that on this video because it can be long and arduous but the the short version is essentially you need good reason to own a shotgun sex one shotgun sorry in the UK and good reason would be you’re a member of a club that shoots practical shotgun or target shotgun um or you’ve got some other reason like you manage land and perhaps a two plus one um just wouldn’t be sufficient for the type of shooting that you do or something along those lines essentially you would need some sort of justification for why you need this sort of shotgun as opposed to one of these why that extra capacity is important so for instance in Practical shotgun or target shotgun if you’re shooting multiple Targets in a competition or a stage you need to be able to shoot multiple shots without constantly reloading and therefore a section one shotgun is what you need um and sometimes depending on which county you’re in and your police force they can be a little bit difficult uh to obtain because some uh police forces basically don’t like to um Grant these on on firearms certificates unless you’ve really got a good reason you have to kind of demonstrate uh that you’ve either done safety courses or that you do partake in competitions and those kinds of things uh before they would consider uh giving you one of these not giving it to you but putting it on your license um again that’s not in every County but I know some police forces are pretty strict on uh allowing people to have these on their license um but once you’ve have got it obviously you can only get the one section one Shotgun If you uh have only got one one slot on your license for it you might be able to get multiple but again I think you’d probably have to have really good reason to do that like you’d have to be either a high level competition shooter or something along those lines um to get more than one put on your license but most cases you’re going to have one on your license so that means you can only have the one unlike with section two shotguns where you can have multiple um so that comes under a firearms license you can’t get one of these on a uh section 2 shotgun certificate and so the same goes for any of these types of shotguns the pump action or the semi-automatic you can get bigger capacity five 7 10 even 12 round magazine tubes that come past the end of the barrel um and those will come under section one uh shotgun um you can also get shorter shotguns as well so if it’s pump action or semi-automatic it has to be a minimum length um but if it’s lever action that length is actually shorter so you may have seen on the UK shooting scene uh short and look like soff shotguns but they’re not soff they’re perfectly legal but they’re section one shotgun and they must be lever action I think I think it might be Adler actually that make make it um this I think a Turkish company that make it they’re not very common um because they’re not ideal for um competitions because they have limited capacity so they they’ve got very limited use but you can get them on a section one uh firearm certificate if you wanted to but I think the probably the most common section one shotgun would be a tube fed something similar to this like a semi-automatic tube fed but with a longer tube um but you do also see a lot of these magazine fed shotguns so essentially similar to a rifle you load your shotgun rounds into there this is 12 gauge and then that fixes to the rifle and then you just [ __ ] it obviously it’s empty and off you go and each time you squeeze your trigger you fire one round and that’s ideal for a practical shotgun um or target shotgun um because you can find multiple rounds in a stage and minimize reloading and obviously when you do come to reloading it’s as simple as changing your magazine fixing a new one so pretty good for that style of shotgun shooting you wouldn’t take something like this clay pigeon shooting certainly get a lot of funny looks if you did um and it just wouldn’t be any good for it especially with this Hawk Red Dot on there good luck hitting Clays if that’s what you were trying to do but there you go that’s a sort of introduction to shotguns in the UK hope you found this video useful and giving you a bit of information like I said this isn’t everything there are other calibers you can own other types of shotguns I mean this covers most of it with semi-automatic pump action side by side or double barreled um and magazine fed that covers most stuff but like I say you can also get lever action you can get 12 gauge single barrels those kinds of things um I know in other countries you can get things like triple barrels and stuff but that would actually in the UK be considered section one so you’d need to get on the section one Firearms certificate uh I’m not sure if anyone owns one of those probably not um and you can get bigger calibers than 12 gauge as well but again it’s not very common so hope you’ve enjoyed this video if you have please feel free to give it a like um and if you haven’t already uh subscribe thanks for [Music] watching