Out of Business: Police Seize Guns from Kent Pest Controller

Police have seized the shotguns and rifles of a Kent pest controller, after his worried wife reported concerns about his welfare.

Lewis Dedman, pictured above, has been told he can't have his tools of the trade back until he has undergone a mental health assessment, but medical professionals have so far stonewalled that request.

Speaking in an interview with Fieldsports TV, Lewis described how he and his wife had a row, which resulted in him leaving the family home to go for a walk to clear his head.

With the hours ticking by his concerned wife contacted Kent Police, who duly attended the property and seized his shotguns and rifles.

Lewis's full interview is shown in the video below.

To prevent repetition, from now on I shall simply refer to shotguns and rifles as firearms, although I'm sure most people reading will realise there is a clear distinction between the two in terms of both legislation and functionality.

I shall now, as tradition dictates, put in my two penneth.

By way of context, I should volunteer two facts - I have previously served in the Armed Forces and live in a rural part of the country where people wouldn't bat an eyelid if they saw the local farmer walking around the fields with a shotgun broken beneath his arm.

For all I wouldn't consider myself a fully fledged "countrysider", I fully appreciate there are certain rural jobs that require the use of firearms. For people doing those jobs, firearms are an intrinsic tool of the trade.

In England and Wales there are strict controls on who can and cannot keep firearms. You can only have a firearm if you have somewhere safe and secure to store it and a verifiable, legitimate use for it.

Anyone applying for a shotgun or firearms certificate will be subject to thorough background checks. If their application is granted, they will be subject to ongoing scrutiny by the local police force, as Lewis's case aptly demonstrates. The police will only grant an application if the applicant is deemed suitable in every way.

Lewis ticked all of those boxes. He has conscientiously held firearms, without any problems whatsoever, for a number of years.

Like the overwhelming majority of his peers he is a responsible firearms owner and user - these are not the gun-totting maniacs you see turning over banks or committing terrible acts of violence.

Furthermore, their legally-held, responsibly-owned firearms are not the ones facilitating crime and misery on the streets of Britain.

The police have seized Lewis's firearms, valued at £20,000, on the basis that he has stormed out of the house after a very trivial marital tiff - the sort of thing that happens daily in households across the land and is no indication whatsoever of heightened risk or sinister intent.

He can now not do the job he needs to financially support his much-loved wife and child, with a second child on the way.

It is to be hoped that Kent Police gets this resolved to Lewis's satisfaction at the earliest opportunity.