In 2012 the Home Office reported that, "in 2010/11, firearms were involved in 11,227 recorded offences in England and Wales, the seventh consecutive annual fall". [14] Firearms statistics in England and Wales include airguns and imitation guns, which make up a high proportion of these recorded offences (see under "Firearms crime" below).
en.wikipedia.org
Sorry db...
Apparently, flintlocks are on the rise...
When police on a weapons raid swarmed a housing project after London’s 2011 riots, they seized a cache of arms that in the United States might be better suited to “Antiques Roadshow” than inner-city ganglands. Inside plastic bags hidden in a trash collection room, officers uncovered two archaic flintlock pistols, retrofitted flare guns and a Jesse James-style revolver. These days, that kind of antiquated firepower is about the baddest a British gang member can get. Spurred to action by a series of mass shootings — including one startlingly similar to the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut — Britain entered an era of national soul-searching in which legislative bans on assault weapons and handguns were pushed through and background checks for other types of firearms dramatically tightened.
washingtonpost.com
Now, as the article points out, passing legislation isn't enough. The laws need to be actually enforced...
Statistics, however, suggest that the gun bans alone did not have an immediate impact on firearm-related crime. Over time, however, gun violence in virtually all its guises has significantly come down with the aid of stricter enforcement and waves of police anti-weapons operations. The most current statistics available show that firearms were used to kill 59 people in all of England and Wales in 2011, compared with 77 such homicides that same year in Washington, D.C., alone.
Why this is notable, I am not really sure. |
