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- Four years after the Dunblane massacre,
Britain's tighter gun laws have failed completely. Now there is a
race against time to stop the UK from becoming as trigger-happy as
the US.
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- [Officers are being confronted by youngsters on
mountain bikes with automatic weapons]
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- Britain's gun control laws, introduced after the
Dunblane massacre in 1996, have proven to be a disaster. There are
now an estimated three million illegal firearms in the UK, perhaps
double the number of four years ago, and the only effect the
knee-jerk political reaction that led to the Firearms (Amendment)
Act 1997 has had is to shut down legitimate gun clubs.
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- Fears that Britain is on the way to adopting a
US-style gun culture are now a reality "We look to Los Angeles for
the language we use," Morrissey once sang, but it was never
envisaged that "drive-by shooting" and "Big Mac" (the Mac-10
sub-machine gun, which fires 20 rounds a second) would become as
much a part of the vocabulary of street-wise teenagers in
Merseyside, Glasgow and London as hamburger and fries.
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- Some believe the three million figure, collated
by Home Affairs Committee researchers working on a recent
parliamentary report into the gun trade. Either way, vast stockpiles
of weapons have fuelled a spate of shootings in Britain's cities,
including Manchester where a 17-year-old was recently killed.
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- The new research suggests that in some areas a
third of young criminals, classed as those aged 15 to 25 with
convictions, own or have access to guns ranging from Beretta
sub-machine guns to Luger pistols, which change hands on street
corners and in pubs for as little as 150.
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- "There is a move from the pistol and shotgun to
automatic weapons," says Detective Superintendent Keith Hudson of
the National Crime Squad. "We are recovering weapons that are
relatively new - and sometimes still in their boxes from eastern
European countries."
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- In London there were more than 20 fatal
shootings last year allegedly linked with the Yardies, gangsters who
have their roots in Jamaica, compared with nine killings in 1998. In
one, Andy Balfour, 32, was shot eight times with a Mac 10, and last
summer BBC hip-hop disc jockey Tim Westwood was shot by a man on a
motorbike who opened fire as he drove home from a gig in Kennington,
south London.
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- Last month, Gabriel Egharevba, 17, was also shot
by a man on a motorcycle in Longsight, Manchester, the eighth fatal
shooting in the city in seven months. The previous year two
teenagers aged 14 and 17 were gunned down in the same area by a gang
with automatic machine guns.
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- Police say that modern weapons are fast becoming
fashion accessories, along with trainers and jewellery, among young
drug dealers protecting themselves and their territory. Unarmed
officers now find themselves being confronted by youngsters on
mountain bikes brandishing automatic guns.
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- In Birmingham there have been about 100 crimes a
month involving firearms since last March, compared with 88 a month
in the year ending April 1998. Two men were shot dead in the city in
separate incidents at Christmas.
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- The government declared an amnesty on guns after
Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and a teacher in Dunblane,
resulting in 162,000 weapons being handed in, but this has failed to
make even a dent in the underworld's supply of pistols and
revolvers. A steady flow continues to come in from former Eastern
bloc countries, but criminals have now found an even cheaper and
safer source of weaponry
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- "Factories" up and down the country are churning
out decommissioned guns, often stolen from private collectors and
sold at trade fairs and through the classified ads of specialist
magazines, that have been reactivated by re-boring the barrels and
replacing the firing pin.
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- Another growing source of illegal guns are
"cloning" or "off-ticket sale" dealers, who operate in a similar way
to car ringers. Stolen firearms disappear by being given the
identity of an older decommissioned weapon, details of which don't
have to be recorded under present laws. Last year, ex-Special
Constable Tony Mitchell was jailed for eight years for supplying
criminals with hundreds of guns he specialised in Mac 10's at 1,100
apiece. He used his engineering skills to convert the guns from
de-activated products bought via mail order catalogues. One was
traced to a 1997 street murder in Brixton and another shooting of a
police officer by a youth in Manchester's Moss Side. In all, police
linked guns supplied by Mitchell to 130 crime scenes.
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- As an indication of how Mitchell and other
dealers feel they can operate with impunity in Britain, he continued
his activities even after a police raid that saw him arrested and
released when no guns were found.
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- Detective Constable Cliff Purvis of the National
Crime Squad said: "Some of the weapons which bore Mitchell's
'signature' mark have been used in killings and to fire at police.
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- "I'm sure he was one of the major contributors
to illegal firearms in this country He was a big fish. There's no
question of that."
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- A big fish or not, Mitchell's shoes were very
quickly filled in what is thought to be a multi-million pound black
market industry Opponents of the handgun ban, introduced after
Dunblane, claim it has failed to cut gun crime because of the
multiple sources of weapons available to criminals.
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- Home Office figures soon to be released will
show that, overall, armed crime rose 10 per cent in 1998. There were
13,671-armed offences compared with 12,410 the previous year.
Firearms experts have long called for more research to assess the
accurate flow of illegal weapons and, although attempts are being
made by the Home Affairs Committee, it remains to be seen if the
government will act upon its recommendations. It is a relatively
simple measure to clamp down on identifiable gun clubs and
collectors, but another to penetrate the underworld.
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- Bill Harriman, a member of the Firearms
Consultative Committee and a spokesman for the British Association
for Shooting and Conservation, says that current legislation focuses
on law-abiding citizens who belong to gun clubs. "It should," he
says, "have been directed at illegally held firearms."
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- Even though pistols were banned under the
Dunblane regulations, they are still the weapon of choice for armed
criminals and were used in 1,854 of the 3,029 armed robberies in
England and Wales in 1997.
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- The government had plenty of evidence at its
disposal to realise that simply banning certain types of weapons is
ineffective. For example, fully-automatics have been prohibited
since 1937 but it has not stopped criminals using them. Harriman
believes that, far from being discouraged from using guns,
criminals, as well as people with no criminal record, are becoming
more trigger-happy
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- "Firearms are now being used to settle minor
disputes," he comments. "There's an argument in the pub and it's
settled in the car park with a bullet, or someone keeps a pistol in
the glove compartment of his car and uses it in a fit of road rage.
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- "The Dunblane legislation should have been
directed at stopping this attitude and taking handguns out of the
grasp of criminals. If the 95 million paid in compensation to former
pistol owners had been used to target armed robbers, something
fundamental could have been done to end gun culture."
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- Harriman's view is supported by a large number
of police officers who privately say that the 1997 legislation IS a
nonsense, but are afraid to speak publicly for fear of offending
their political masters. One exception is Superintendent Nigel
Sutcliffe of West Yorkshire, who says in a submission put before the
Home Affairs Committee: "It is clear that the bans introduced in the
Firearms (Amendment) Act in respect of handguns have not worked, in
that for the first six months of 1999, 59 handguns have been used in
West Yorkshire.
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- "Clearly, these handguns could not be lawfully
possessed and, therefore, must have been illegally imported into the
country or already be in the unlawful possession of someone.
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- "These facts tend to support those shooting
organisations who were opposing the ban of handguns... in that
handguns in the lawful possession of those involved in target
shooting were rarely used in criminal activity" However, the gun
used at Dunblane was legally held by Hamilton, a gun club member.
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- As well as eastern Europe, America is also a
foreign source of illegal weapons. British security services
recently revealed that weapons bought at Florida gun shows and
posted to the UK had been intercepted in north London and
Manchester.
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- MI6 has no idea how many packages have already
got through, but are aware of larger consignments being brought
across the Atlantic by private yachts and dropped into the sea off
the Kent coast. The bundles are fitted with remote-controlled
flotation tanks and beacons, the signals from which can be picked up
by global positioning systems.
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- One effect the handgun ban does seem to have had
is to lead to a shortage of ammunition, which means that the illegal
armouries make even more money by supplying that as well.
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- Perversely, the law actually assists criminals
in building their own ammunition because a loophole does not make it
an offence to own or even to have the component parts sent through
the post. Anyone can buy primers, cases, propellant and bullets (the
missile) without any form of certification. The gun only needs to be
registered once the pieces are put together to form a whole.
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- In written evidence to the Home Affairs
Committee, the Police Federation has pointed out the "laxity" of the
Dunblane legislation in not dealing with ammunition, as well as a
number of other "inconsistencies".
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- It says: "The time is now right for parliament
to address the entire issue and produce a completely new Firearms
Act. Any lesser step will be insufficient."
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- The Police Federation is demanding that
anomalies such as someone being legally permitted to own a shotgun
while being deemed unfit to possess a firearm, as happened at
Cardiff Crown Court in April last year, must be changed. It's a
question of whether the government has the bottle to enact something
more effective than the cosmetic exercise it undertook last time.
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