Nigel Farage has a gun problem

Reform says Britain can trust it on firearms. Farage’s record, and the harder politics growing around him, say otherwise.

A dangerous view of gun control

Nigel Farage has spent years indulging a dangerous view of gun control, and the issue now is trust. In 2014 he called the handgun ban introduced after Dunblane, the deadliest mass shooting in modern British history, “ludicrous” and “kneejerk”. He said Britain needed “a proper gun licensing system”, which he thought largely already existed, and argued that criminalising handguns meant “only the criminals carry the guns”, recycling the language of a longstanding American gun-rights slogan popularised by the NRA. When those remarks returned in 2025, he did not withdraw them.

Farage later moved easily through the same hard-right circuit at CPAC, where NRA chief Wayne LaPierre was also on the bill, which matters because it shows the political company he keeps. Farage’s remarks were not stray or clumsy, but borne out of a worldview that sees gun regulation as an irritation imposed on the respectable, while borrowing rhetoric that has done immense damage in the United States.

Reform’s official platform talks about protecting “country sports”, and it says it has no intention of changing gun laws. At the same time, Zia Yusuf is proposing a British deportation force modelled on ICE, with powers to track down, detain and deport people on a huge scale. Yusuf says such a force would not carry weapons. Fine. But why should anyone hand that benefit of the doubt to a party led by a man who has already treated post-Dunblane gun law with contempt? Once a party starts building a harsher enforcement state and wrapping itself in imported right-wing politics, the public would be foolish to assume the safeguards will hold forever.

In March 1996, Thomas Hamilton entered Dunblane Primary School and murdered 16 children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor. The reforms that followed came from national trauma and from a refusal to leave Britain’s gun laws substantially where they were after children had been slaughtered in their classroom. Those reforms did protect Britons. Dunblane remains Britain’s only school shooting, and the post-Dunblane settlement became part of the reason this country is far safer than places that chose to indulge gun-lobby myths instead. Farage looked at that settlement and dismissed its importance. Reform can soften the language, tidy the presentation and offer reassurances, but a party led by a man who downplayed the necessity of strict gun law after Dunblane cannot be trusted.

Featured image via the Canary