Thread: FIREARMS REGISTER: A very interesting conundrum.

Originally Posted by BSA

Friend of mine got a phone call from an Arms Officer from another district - Do you still own XXXXX Pistol ??. Yes I do. Is it still in your possession - Yes it is, Why. We have just had a person Register XXXXX Pistol with exactly the same Serial Number as yours. Oh Dear.

Then think about things like Lee Enfield rifles, each manufacturer of No1MkIII variants used a repeating format of a letter prefix followed by four digit number. Each block of a letter gave you 10,000 odd rifles, every 26 blocks they started back at 'A' and continued on. In the height of the war they repeated these letter blocks two or three times a year, so it's quite likely to find two rifles from the same factory in the same year with the same serial number. Combined with that, they used the number on the barrel as the master number (barrel being the hardest component to make) and renumbered the action bodies to the new barrel number when it was replaced. It's not uncommon to see multiple barrel numbers on an action, I had one with 5 on it at one stage. Nowadays we use the action as the master part so in theory all of those 5 numbers are legit serial numbers.

And then think about everything that isn't serialled in Arabic or English - Russian, Turkish, Syrian, Hebrew, Siamese, Chinese, Japanese - even Australian if I'm not feeling kind. It's going to be a little difficult to enter those in on a standard keyboard I'd say.