Gun UK

A boy with an assault rifle in his boot. Gang wars. Calls for an armed police force. You are now entering... Gun UK

'In Brixton, parents worry every time their young men go out, even if it is to a friend's house to watch football on satellite TV," said the Rev Sheila Coughtrey. "They might innocently get caught up in someone else's argument, and when a situation arises around here, all too often guns are produced."

'In Brixton, parents worry every time their young men go out, even if it is to a friend's house to watch football on satellite TV," said the Rev Sheila Coughtrey. "They might innocently get caught up in someone else's argument, and when a situation arises around here, all too often guns are produced."

As a community nurse, then as an ordained Church of England minister, Ms Coughtrey has watched guns become part of everyday life in south London. "You are still shocked every time someone is shot, but you are getting used to being shocked. That's the best way I can put it," she said.

Ms Coughtrey had just presided at an emotional memorial service in Christ Church, Brixton Road, for Derek Bennett, a 29-year-old parking attendant shot dead by the police on a housing estate a few hundred yards away on 16 July. His death is still under investigation, but it highlights several aspects of the crisis over guns on British streets.

In the borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, there is more than one firearms incident a day. Twice every week, shots are fired. To the police, Derek Bennett appeared to be menacing passers-by with a chrome-plated pistol of a kind used all too frequently in south London, and they shot him six times – four of the bullets hitting him in the back. His "pistol" turned out to be a cigarette lighter.

Despite – or probably because of – the blanket ban on handguns after the Dunblane massacre, convincing-looking replicas are becoming increasingly prevalent. Some can easily be turned into a real weapon with a little engineering: last week police raided a "factory" in Bermondsey, south London, where they found eight replica pistols in the process of being converted into firearms. According to one police source, the workshop might have been turning out two working pistols a day for anything up to a year.

But criminals are able to get their hands on much more dangerous weaponry than "activated" replicas. Examples of all the firearms shown on this page have been seized since the beginning of the year in London, where there has been a sharp rise in drug-related killings within the black community. The Metropolitan Police has set up a special task force, known as Operation Trident, to target the problem following the deaths of 29 young black men since the beginning of 1989.

The problem is by no means confined to the capital – country towns as well as inner cities have seen a rise in firearms incidents. When a gunman can wound a doorman at a club in London's West End, then hijack a delivery van after shooting the driver in the arm, as happened on Thursday, it is easy for the media to claim that parts of certain British cities are becoming as gun-ridden as US ghettos, and to present shootouts between heavily armed gangs of Yardies as a common event.

Figures on gun crime in Britain are so murky, however, as to be capable of a variety of interpretations. Differing methods of collecting statistics among the 43 police forces in England and Wales mean it is hard to decide how bad things are getting – or even whether they are getting worse at all. The definition of a "firearms incident", for example, can include a mugging in which the robber claimed to be armed, but never produced a weapon. In one case, the "gun" turned out to be a banana in a plastic bag, but it contributed to an apparent 31 per cent increase in armed robbery. The number of illegal weapons in circulation is said to be 250,000 to 300,000, but that is no more than a guess.

Sifting what is often anecdotal evidence, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) says that, far from seeking heavy firepower, the trend among criminals actually appears to be towards smaller, more easily concealed weapons. Although many reports dwell on Yardie hitmen coming in from Jamaica, for the past 10 years most illegal firearms in Britain, like most smuggled people and drugs, have arrived from the Balkans.

Despite the occasional dramatic shootout in parts of London, Manchester or Birmingham, the NCIS points out that handgun crime was higher in the early 1990s. More people were killed with illegal handguns than ever before in 1999-2000, but the total was still a modest 42, not significantly higher in statistical terms than the 35 who died in 1993 or the 39 in 1997. In most cases, the victims were believed to be criminals rather than innocent bystanders.

It is easy to forget that if airguns are excluded, firearms are used in only 0.1 per cent of all serious crime in Britain. (Including airguns, the figure is still only 0.2 per cent.) Yet police officers are going armed more and more often, and are calling for more powerful weapons to counter the perceived threat from armed criminals. For the first time in the UK (outside Northern Ireland), the Nottinghamshire force is experimenting with armed foot patrols on two estates.

The typical "firearms incident" in Britain is not a Yardie gun battle outside a nightclub, however, but a mugging in a poor, ethnically mixed inner-city area in which a gun that may or may not be real is shown but not fired. Both the perpetrator and the victim are likely to be black. Instead of regularly finding themselves up against trigger-happy gangs of crack dealers, the police have shot dead a man brandishing a samurai sword (in Liverpool), a naked, unarmed man in his bedroom (in West Sussex) and a middle-aged Scotsman carrying a table leg in a bag whom they wrongly believed to be an IRA terrorist (in east London).

Strangely, opponents of the post-Dunblane ban on handguns with a barrel of less than 30cm tend to claim that gun crime is spiralling out of control, while those who want even tighter restrictions say the ban is working. "As the number of gun licences has gone down, armed crime has gone up," said Colin Greenwood, a former policeman who is now a firearms consultant. "The ban only applies to honest people. Criminals and terrorists haven't handed their guns in. It is a wonderful police fallacy that if you tackle guns, you eliminate them – as soon as one source of supply is closed, another opens."

The Gun Control Network, a lobby group, retorts that all guns start out legal. While Britain does not have a low rate of violent crime, it adds, we do have a low rate of gun crime. "In many ways we are the gold standard for gun-control legislation in the world, but we must not be complacent," said Gill Marshall-Andrews, the group's head. The GCN complains that children as young as eight can still be taught to shoot in this country, while the lower limit in most European countries is 18. It also wants a ban on replica firearms, although the Government is reported to have decided that it would be impossible to frame legislation.

The NCIS, too, suspects that much of the reported increase in the use of firearms is due to replicas. "It is unclear whether this means real guns are becoming harder to obtain, or whether criminals are making a calculated choice," it said in a report last week. Since in 80 to 90 per cent of offences guns were used only as a threat, "replicas would often suffice and would have the advantage of reducing the penalties for being caught in possession". For Derek Bennett, though, the penalty was death.