Police move to tackle huge rise in gun crime
by Ian Burrell, Home Affairs Correspendent
15 January 2001
A national firearms database is to be established for the first time, amid fears over record levels of gun crime.
The setting up of the database, recommended by the official inquiry into the Dunblane massacre of 1996, comes as a report by senior criminal intelligence officers has uncovered "major weaknesses" in the way British police tackle gun crime. For the past 11 months, a team of officers from the National Criminal Intelligence Service has compiled details of weapons and ammunition seized by the police and has concluded that the scale of Britain's black market in firearms is "far higher than anybody had previously thought".
It has also uncovered shortcomings in police knowledge of the network of international weapons traffickers and rogue gun dealers who are responsible for arming Britain's criminals. Figures produced by Lord Bassam of Brighton, a Home Office minister, last week showed that gun crime was at its highest level for seven years with 42 people being killed in 4,000 incidents involving handguns last year. The Home Office said yesterday that the database of legal gunowners was under development and would be ready by February next year.
A spokesman said it hoped that the database, which will contain the names and addresses of all licensed rifle and shotgun holders in Britain, would assist police in tracking illegal gun traffickers. "Bearing in mind the new figures on gun-related crime, everyone in the Government realises there is still work to do," he said.
But the idea of a database has proved controversial with some lawful gunholders who complained that they were being unfairly blamed for the murder of 16 children by Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane. Mike Yardley, spokesman for the Sportsmen's Association, said: "Some individuals saw it as another bureaucratic sickener that was targeting them and not the real criminals."
He said a register made "some sense" but that there would be no impact on gun crime unless the Government tackled drug dealing and the illegal import of weapons.
The criminal intelligence team investigating illegal guns – known as the National Firearms Tracing Service – was set up last summer at the behest of the Home Office after the European Union demanded that all member states compile reports on illegal gun trafficking. The British report is due to be sent to Europol, the Europe-wide criminal intelligence organisation based in Brussels, in March.
It found that Britain, as well as being one of the only countries in Europe not to have a national database of legal gun owners, had no national structure for tracing illegal firearms.
The report said: "Gathering and central analysis of recovered firearm intelligence was identified at an early stage as a major weakness in the UK ... Police forces are not obliged to trace recovered firearms and no central figures or intelligence is available for recoveries in the UK."
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