U.K. Cracking Down On Gun Crime

Howdie, and welcome to UK Corral, where the kids in Britain's inner cities now carry guns as fashion accessories... where gun crime in the past year has risen twenty percent... where last week four young black girls came out of a party at a hairdressing salon for a breath of fresh air and were hit by a hail of bullets from a machine gun.... two died.

No one in the area wants to tell the police who did it in case they are next.... but there are only two possibilities. Either they WERE just caught in the crossfire... or someone decided to kill them to teach someone else a lesson... to show respect.

It's not the kind of crime that bothers most of us, tucked up safely in our
suburban homes. It's mostly linked to drugs gangs battling for territory... it's mostly said to be young black men who routinely carry guns as they go
about their business.

Often they carry hand guns... which were supposed to have been banned from this country after the massacre of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher at a small Scottish town called Dunblane in 1996 ...but these days sub machine guns like the Israeli made Uzi and the American made Mac 10 are favourites as well.

Tony Blair's government, which, like our urban cowboys, also tends to shoot from the hip, will this week announce all kinds of crackdowns - high prison sentences for possession of a gun, the banning of replica weapons which can be converted to the real thing, and we are bound to have a summit of police, criminologists, community leaders and anyone else they think will provide an instant headline.

I hope it works... but I fear we are heading in the same direction as you, where according to the latest figures I have, about 80 people die every day from gun related deaths. Sometimes I think we all tend to concentrate on the enemy abroad... and forget about the killers at home.
By Peter Allen