Less than a week after the murder of Jessie James, the teenager caught in gangland crossfire in Manchester, police raiding a house in Kent have uncovered a collection of guns so large that they estimate it will take them three days just to catalogue. Pump-action shotguns and automatic weapons were among those festooning every wall of the house, and live ammunition was heaped on the floor.
Nothing will ease the grief of the James family. Nor is there any question that gun crime blights entire communities and poses a lethal, complex challenge to police that has not yet been fully met. But the easy conclusion to draw from yesterday’s images of “hundreds and hundreds” of weapons stacked up behind suburban curtains — that Britain is awash with guns and in the grip of a gun crime epidemic — is overly pessimistic.
Gun homicide numbers have risen steadily since 1996, the year of the Dunblane massacre in which 16 children died. But the figure of 68 deaths for 2003-04, the last full year for which official statistics are available, is low by European standards and lower than immediately before Dunblane. The total number of gun crimes recorded last year was, alarmingly, nearly 11,000, but fewer than one in ten of these crimes involved an actual shooting and a fraction of that fraction proved fatal.
While international comparisons should not be used to trivialise worsening problems at home, it is worth noting that the total of 15 shooting deaths investigated in London last year by the Scotland Yard Operation Trident was equivalent to fewer than half the homicides recorded in Los Angeles last month alone.
The epidemic that several major urban police forces do face is of black-on-black gang warfare of the kind that Trident was set up to combat. This initiative boasts an impressive proportion of murders solved, rising from one in five six years ago to nearly 100 per cent last year. But it has been less successful at preventing shootings: the number of non-fatal incidents investigated by Trident rose by a third last year.
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The ripple effect of gun violence is widely felt, not least by innocents reduced to watching their backs on council estates that have all but been abandoned by police to armed drug gangs.
Stemming the demand for illegal handguns may warrant periodic amnesties. It certainly requires more effective outreach efforts to persuade vulnerable teenagers that arming themselves only invites danger, and that the popularisation of a macho gun culture does have negative consequences.
Blocking the supply of sophisticated weapons requires tough enforcement of existing laws, and regular raids. The gun trade is international and highly complex, and the man arrested in Kent may prove to have mastered its complexities in entirely legal ways. Gun enthusiasts will certainly leap to his defence. But it is better to be debating the costs of gun violence with stringent controls in place than without the basic protections that they afford.