Real or Fantasy Piece? No5 Help?

[Buccaneer]

First of all I should like to apologise to "Son" for taking this thread in a somewhat different direction than he first intended.
I am an RFD myself and have had long discussions about weather in particular the SKN armourers sectioned rifles were or were not firearms and whether they should or should not be "deactivated" as defined by what was then UK firearms law in both pre and post 1996 specifications.
I know that this a VERY grey area with strong opinions held on either side, I was told by one of the friends I shoot with that an SKN sectioned No4 was used to fire blanks for sound effects during various school plays so they could at least be made to go bang if nothing else.
This however is NOT the point that I was trying to make, after the terrible terrorist shootings in France a few years ago it was discovered that the weapons used had been so badly deactivated that it took minimal effort to restore them to a serviceable condition, it was at this point the bureaucrats of the EU stepped in.
They decided in their infinite wisdom that they would come up with their own deactivation specification that would apply across the EU regardless of what was already in place in the member states, the various bodies here in the UK tried unsuccessfully to point out the specification here in the UK was as good as what they were proposing but to no avail.
A directive was issued that stated that ANY deactivated rifle that did not meet their new specification it would be deemed to be "defectively deactivated" and could not be sold, given or lent unless it was brought up to the new spec, you could however keep it.
This last bit meant that people who had spent quite large sums on both pre and post 1996 specification deactivated rifles would now see the value of their collections vastly reduced overnight without the need for any form of compensation.
As I pointed out in my original post the No5 in question was a firearm when it was sectioned, not an SKN training aid, and therefore it would if held in the UK or any other part of the EU would deemed to be defectively deactivated and could not be sold. The EU directive was not interested in whether it was or was not a firearm in a former life or whether common sense would say that a rifle sectioned in that could of course never been fired, if it did not meet their specification then it failed.
This is why when I asked the proof master at the Birmingham proof house if my sectioned No4 could by all common sense be deemed to be deactivated I was told that it wasn't because of the way that the directive had been worded.
I read with some amusement the accounts of some people buying skeletonized rifles from an RFD auction house having been told that they could sell them "off ticket", if it is the one I am thinking about then they have something of a reputation of being rather generous with their descriptions, a little like the description of the Long Branch sniper rifle with the Griffin & Howe mount that is being discussed at the moment.
I guess that we can chew the fat on this subject until the cows come home and until someone ends up in a court somewhere or we eventually leave the EU and manage to return to some form of sanity we will not see this mess cleared up.