It has been more than 39 years since the enactment of the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act in 1983, with only 15 articles thereof when it was first introduced. Compared with the regulations of advanced countries, it is evident that the Act does not address adequately in aspects of control scope, definition, categorization, delineation, culpability, management and affiliated regulations, and neither did it establish a comprehensive system. During the legislation, a punitive criminal policy was adopted on the consideration that the punishment prescribed by the Criminal Code of the Republic of China was regarded not severe enough to exert control. However, the Act was rushed to be drafted and enacted solely in reference to the Criminal Code of the Republic of China, Self-defense Guns Control Act, and Criminal Code of the Armed Forces during the legislative process, without consulting foreign legislations, resulting in a manifold of errors and loopholes in addition to the confusion in the application of the Act, which has subsequently been revised 14 times and pronounced unconstitutional 3 times due to incessant controversies aroused thereby.
The current gains and losses of the Act, in terms of legislative policy, the delineation of control scope, intelligible principle of law, the principle of equivalent punishment, the categorization and definition of firearms, ammunition, knifes and imitation guns, the procedures and benchmarks of forensic examination and determination, the hunting guns made by indigenous people and the related safety concerns, as reflected in its legislative history, fuel a heated debate among the academia and practitioners alike, and the disputes have not yet concluded as of now.
Given the unabated disagreements on the enforcement of the Act, and that not only did the amendments to the Act fail to resolve the issues, but they also caused greater controversies due to misreference to foreign legislations, this paper focus on the controversies observed among practitioners, for which major issues of law concerning decisions made by the competent authorities and judiciary were collected and the legislative considerations and systems of relevant countries were analyzed. Through methodologies of literature review, comparative research and historical method, the inadequacies of the current legislation were examined and suggestions for future amendments were proposed as reference.