Law and Care The relationship between contemporary Nordic firearms law and conservation.

Abstract

The objective of this study is to research the care and storage of firearms requiring a license in various museums in the Nordic countries. With increasingly strict gun laws in place within Europe, the question is raised whether museums manage to find a balance between their country´s gun laws and the conservation care, they would like to provide to their collections of modern firearms that fall under these laws. This study was inspired by an internship experience at the Swedish museum of Science and Technology, where the storage of firearms had not received some particular attention. In order to investigate this question, both a questionnaire enquiry and face-to-face interview methods were used. Although most museums were understandably cautious about providing certain types of information about such a sensitive part of their collections, a picture emerged of a pattern of care, which sought to manage the problems raised by the legal framework under which modern firearms may be kept by museums. This pattern of care appears largely to be shared by Nordic museums, even though no formalized standards exist for the care and conservation of this material in these countries. The example of a UK museum with a significant firearm collection, was included in order to test whether this common ground exists wider than the Nordic countries. As a final outcome of this research a set of recommendations for the care of modern firearms is presented, which brings together the result, which emerged from this research.