It may not be emotionally correct to point it out just now, but there’s one thing about the US that still makes us Brits feel morally superior. For all our problems, we still say with confidence, “At least we don’t have guns!”
If you’re nodding along happily with that sentiment, then it’s time you got real. The Met says there are three million illegally held guns in mainland Britain today. Scotland Yard sent its armed response vehicles out 1,812 times in 1999-2000 (a rate of five per day) – an increase of 129 per cent in just three years. The as-yet unpublished figures for 2000-01 are widely expected to show another significant increase. The deputy commissioner of the Met, Ian Fuller, warns that gun crime is “threatening the fabric of London”. The British people have turned their noses away from the whiff of cordite hanging over this island for too long. It’s time we admitted that we live in a gun culture.
Sure, you’re probably muttering – in inner-city ghettos, no doubt there are a few hard-core criminals blowing each others’ brains out, but how does it affect me? It’s all part of an underworld which you can (if you’re honest) happily ignore, right? Sorry, but that’s another delusion. In the last five years, guns have begun breaking out of criminal enclaves and shooting into everyday life. To give one of many examples, earlier this year, Alice Carroll, 70, was shot in the back as a gunman opened fire on another man near her home in a quiet residential cul-de-sac in Longsight, Manchester. A freak occurrence? Tell that to the mother and father gunned down in front of their seven-year-old son; to the 14-year-old shot down with an automatic machine gun; the man shot in the head during a “road rage” row; the clubbers, including several teenagers, shot as they queued on one of London’s busiest high streets. They all happened here. They all happened this year. And the list goes on.
How would you go about getting hold of a gun? Surely only the most hardened criminals could even have access to these weapons. I’ve just conducted a small experiment. I called my friend, Joe, a drug dealer, and asked him if he knew anybody who could get hold of a gun for me. Without any hesitation, he said: “No bother, get me £150 and I’ll have one for you tomorrow morning. It’s cheaper to rent them from an armourer, about £70, but you have to pay extra if you fire it, ‘cos then it’s got a history.”
OK, I thought, he’s obviously into crime more heavily than I realised. But surely it can’t be that easy. Wandering down the Charing Cross Road in the centre of London later that evening, I passed a bloke asking people outside a club if they wanted to buy “very good grass”. I took him to one side and told him I was interested in getting hold of a gun. After a few minutes more spent reassuring him I wasn’t a policeman, he said he’d get me one, and that I could collect it at a car boot sale he flogs stuff from on a Sunday morning.
He also told me in a friendly aside that, “if it’s that sort of thing you’re looking for”, the price of contract killings has fallen in the past few years from “a few grand to a couple of hundred quid. You just get junkies to do it now, not pros. It’s totally safe, it’s not like they’ll ever be reliable witnesses or nothing.”
It is possible that they were both bullshitting, or that they were rip-off merchants who would happily take the money but fail actually to produce a gun in exchange. This is the clear conviction of Commander Mike Fuller, the head of Operation Trident, the unit set up to tackle London’s gun crime, who insists that “London is not flooded with guns. You can’t just hire one on any street corner. In fact, it sometimes takes a couple of days, even if you know the right person to approach.” He admits, however, that “the sheer scale [of gun crime] has shocked us”.
Nor is it only criminals who are “tooling up”. For nearly a year now, routine armed foot patrols have been operated in Nottingham – the first time this has happened on the streets of mainland Britain. Figures from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary show that firearms were issued to officers in 10,915 cases in 2000, nearly three times more than in 1991. The old tradition of the bobby equipped only with a truncheon and handcuffs is withering away. Officially, armed police officers are still deployed in mainland Britain for a few specific purposes: to carry out diplomatic duties, to deal with armed robberies or sieges and to meet terrorist threats. Yet Ann Widdecombe, in her ill-fated role as shadow home secretary, argued that “We have now reached a situation where police officers need to carry guns just to do their job.” This seems to have been the opinion of many regional police forces. As Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs, argues, “the police are in danger of slipping into a culture in which it is acceptable to automatically use guns”.
So Widdecombe may inadvertently have put her finger on one of the causes of our problem. Is it a coincidence that the growth in armed crime has coincided with the rise in numbers of armed police officers? Or could it be that criminals confronting armed opponents feel the need to equip themselves with weapons? One senior police officer recently expressed the concern that “arming officers is leading to a dangerous spiral of violence. If the police arm themselves, the criminals will stay a step ahead by obtaining bigger and better weapons. We could be heading for the sort of problems they have in America.”
I asked my new-found friend outside the nightclub if he thought this was true. “We ain’t heading for nothing. We’re there. What do the police think is going to happen if they start going out on raids with f***-off massive shotguns? That dealers will just lie back and take it, paint f***ing crosshairs on their chests and say, ‘Aim here, Mr Policeman’?”
Delroy Brown, a community leader in one of Britain’s most deprived inner-city areas, has said that we are witnessing “the paramilitarisation of the police. If they are armed, within five years you will see a disproportionate number of black youths being killed by mainly white officers.”
One problem with guns is that whenever the topic is discussed, it swiftly becomes contaminated with the language of race. The Tories have already tried to view our gun problems through this lens. A Conservative home affairs spokesman towards the end of the last parliament, David Lidington, even told the Today programme that this rise in crime should prompt us to “look again at immigration controls and maybe impose visa requirements on visitors from Jamaica”.
Jamaican Yardie gangs were hardened during the horrific political battles that detonated there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and some are still acting out those nightmares on the streets of Britain. But raising this fact in an accusatory way neglects to point out that black people are as likely to be victims as perpetrators of gun crimes. Indeed, most shootings in the UK are still, in the police terminology, “black-on-black” crimes.
So what can the Labour government do to tackle this problem? After all, we already have, post-Dunblane, the tightest gun laws in the western world. Yet there are several practical acts that would diminish the number of firearms offences. There could, for example, be a “rolling amnesty” – an indefinite guarantee that anybody who approached the police to hand over firearms would be protected from prosecution.
However, more radical ideas are also called for. The National Criminal Intelligence Service warned in July that there remains a “strong link” between firearm possession and drug trafficking. As such, one way to take a very significant proportion of guns off our streets would be to legalise drugs. This suggestion is favoured privately by many police officers.
Sentencing policy could also be adjusted so that those criminals who did take up firearms were given extra punishment. One distinguished, recently retired Scotland Yard detective who specialised in firearms offences is clear on this point: “Using a firearm needs to be sentenced separately, and on top of whatever the criminal was arrested for. So, for example, if you do a robbery, you get sentenced for that, and on top of it you have a guaranteed sentence simply for being in possession of a gun. That will make criminals think twice about stepping out with a weapon.”
It took the attacks on the World Trade Center to put terrorism at the top of our national agenda. It may take the most awful of “eye-catching initiatives” to put guns there, too.
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