Legal Affairs analyst Jon Silverman reported yesterday in the BBC News that London will implement an anti-gun initiative next month to combat the growing problem of youth gun crime.
Since 1996 handguns have been banned in the United Kingdom, and in the following years authorities have struggled to solve the problem of rising gun crime. According to researcher John R. Lott Jr., gun crime rose by 40 percent in the four years after the ban was enacted. ("Gun laws don't reduce crime," USA Today, May 9, 2002.)
Specifically, the police are looking to target "chaotic" gun crime, which occurs during an episode of shooting by one person or a group of people with little systematic planning.
One example of such a "chaotic" incident where the consequences could have been disastrous was when gunmen burst into a crowded hair salon in south London and fired seven times at a man.
Remarkably, no-one - including the intended target - was hurt. But the CCTV images, shown at a conference to prepare the ground for a New Year anti-gun initiative in the capital, make stark viewing and prompt thoughts about the gun culture and what it represents.
The first major policy announcement of the freshly-appointed Chief Constable of Merseyside, Bernard Hogan-Howe, is the setting up of a new squad of 160 police officers to analyse (sic) and disrupt gun crime.
In his patch, the number of crimes in which a gun was fired has risen from 119 to 267 in the past two years.
Pro-control advocates usually omit data from countries that have an all-out ban on handguns because it's hard to explain (for them, anyway) why the rate of guns being fired has increased, and why more innocent victims are falling by stray bullets from gang related assaults.
Gun-rights advocates have been quick to point out their beliefs on the matter, which is that guns are fired more frequently in areas where they are banned because criminals are able to commit more crime and proliferate in areas where they have the advantage -- unlike in cities in the United States where private citizens are allowed to own and carry handguns.
Gangsters don't have to worry about citizen intervention because lawful citizens are not allowed to possess handguns. The only deterrent is the presence of a police officer at the exact scene of where a crime or gunfight is about to take place. When there's no badge in sight, the criminals and gang members are effectively the law and the ones with all the power.
London authorities have already decided to add more police officers, a strategy that has seen little if any success in the United States when you consider that even some of the smallest cities have more than 1,000 citizens for every one police officer. It is virtually impossible for the police to keep a watchful eye on every citizen, and those not within an officer's close proximity is always a potential victim.
In Merseyside, the number of guns fired in the past two years has more than doubled, and yet authorities expect gun crime to be "disrupted" by adding 160 police officers, without providing any data that suggests increasing the number of police officers in any given are decreases the crime and number of guns fired.
Only time will tell if the addition of more police officers will reduce the gun firing rate, let alone the hope that it will at least somehow slow down the trend of increasing incidents; a problem that must be fixed for the sake of the innocent civilians who have increasingly become victims in recent years.
