If you dont belive me speak to your local firearms officer or the BASC, low power or not it still needs to be locked away.
Safe shooting everyone.
Luckily the police don't make or interpret the legislation; Parliament and the courts do.
The Home Office Guidance is pretty specific on this so would suggest that your Firearms Officer is wrong.
Reasonable precautions 6. The new offence requires people to take ‘reasonable precautions’ to prevent unauthorised access to an air weapon by young persons aged under 18. What will constitute ‘reasonable precautions’ will depend on the particular circumstances in each individual case and it is therefore not possible to be prescriptive. However, the simple steps set out below are a useful starting point. The guidance which follows has been drawn up in consultation with ACPO, the main shooting organisations and others to help everyone make informed and consistent decisions about the safe-keeping of air weapons.
7. Different considerations will apply depending on whether an air weapon is in use or not, and it is helpful to look at these scenarios separately.
Storage at home when not in use 8. A key issue is the presence, or likely presence, of young people under the age of 18. Many people either have young children themselves or are visited by friends and relatives with young children. In order to comply with the new provisions they will therefore need to take reasonable precautions to prevent those children gaining unauthorised access to any air weapons stored in their home.
9. In many cases, this can be achieved by using an existing, suitably robust, lockable cupboard and by keeping the keys separate and secure. Alternatively, they could use a lock or locking device by which an air weapon can be attached to the fabric of a building, or to a fixed feature, or a security cord, lockable chain or similar device attached to a point of anchorage within the building.
10. Where children are very young, it might be sufficient simply to store any air weapons up high and out of their reach, but some form of security cord or similar device would be preferable to guard against a climbing child or older children. This also applies where someone lives alone and they are not normally visited by children.
11. If someone keeps a number of air weapons, perhaps as tools of their job, it might be useful to look at some of the security measures set out in the Home Office’s Firearms Security Handbook 2005. Although that publication is aimed at the security of licensed firearms, they might find some of the Level One security measures suggested for certificate holders equally relevant to the safe storage of air weapons.
12. Anyone who already holds other firearms could use their existing gun cabinet for their air weapon, provided this did not compromise security of those other firearms.
13. Air weapons should be stored within the occupied part of a building and not in an outbuilding, such as a garage or shed, where there is no regular presence to check that the weapons remain secure.
14. Air weapons should always be unloaded when stored. However, this would not be sufficient in itself since the new offence relates to unauthorised access to the weapon. Neither could it be relied on to be safe since air weapon pellets can be accessible to young people and they could be in possession of some at the time they gain unauthorised access to an air weapon.
