Clause 30 - Manufacture, import and sale of realistic imitation firearms
Violent Crime Reduction Bill
5:00 pm
Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Labour)
That opinion is comfortable for people who want to protect the interests of those who shoot for fun—hobbyists or whoever. However, there is no question but that, serious as the gun crime problem is in this country, it makes up only a fraction of that in the United States because we have much stricter, firmer regulations on the use and possession of guns.
What we do about the availability of guns—legal or illegal—the imitations and the hardware has a bearing on the number of people caught up in violent incidents and, ultimately, shot. This is not the time nor the place to talk about the gun culture of some of the young people walking the streets of our city, but I tell the hon. Gentleman this: what was described in the past as a black youth culture approach to gun crime is bleeding—I use the metaphor advisedly—out to other communities.
In Hackney, there are issues with Turkish gun crime, and in the west midlands, Asian youngsters have guns, so let us not talk only about youth culture, but turn again to the hardware. The problem in London is that more than half the weapons seized by the police are converted replicas. I do not want to inconvenience people who want to dress up as cavaliers or world war two soldiers, but that problem is why the amendment has been tabled.
Opposition Members will say, “But the weapons are replicas after all, so what harm can they do?” Well, as I said earlier, the amount of criminal offences involving imitation firearms has rocketed by 66 per cent. The most important fact, and why the police are concerned, is that it is almost impossible to distinguish many imitation weapons from real weapons. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green explained about her work at the Metropolitan Police Authority and said how, when she saw guns—imitation and real—side by side, she could not tell the difference. How is a policeman to tell?
One reason why the police have campaigned on the issue for so long—apparently unheard by Opposition Members—is that they are frightened. When they are called to an incident at which there is a young man with a gun in his hand, how are they to know whether it is real or imitation? We have heard the public furore on all sides of the political debate about the unfortunate shooting of the Brazilian at Stockwell. What would the public say if a 13-year-old was shot because he was carrying an imitation gun that looked too much like a real weapon?
Replica guns are responsible for a substantial proportion of United Kingdom gun crimes. Many of the guns are converted readily at low cost into lethal weapons. We believe that stemming the flow of imitation and replica firearms could have a positive impact on reducing the number of people who die or are injured by firearms. Replica guns put policemen under pressure. It costs thousands of pounds each month for armed policeman to be called out to incidents when it turns out that the gun involved was only a replica. Moreover, the wide availability of replica weapons strengthens the argument for the police to be armed routinely, which neither the police nor I want. It would simply escalate issues on the ground in the communities.
Reference has been made to toys. I do not think children should be using guns as toys. I shall refer to an incident that happened last week: four handguns—two of which were loaded—and a pump-action shotgun, and more than 60 rounds of ammunition, were found hidden in a children’s bedroom. That is the sort of culture that I want to stamp out in my community. Children should not be inducted into the gun culture by being encouraged or allowed to have imitation weapons. An early interest in guns, which may take the form of imitation guns, might lead young people into the illegal market of real handguns. Those guns are currently being carried as a fashion accessory, and failure to ban imitation guns would send out completely the wrong message.
It is inevitable in such a Committee that we deal with detail. It is the proper role of Opposition Members to query Ministers about details and to tease out the thinking behind those details. However, it would be wrong for a Member of Parliament who represented an area such as mine, which has one of the highest levels of death by guns and one of the highest levels of gun crime in the country, not to draw the Committee’s attention from the detail to the reality that the clause is designed to address. I have campaigned for a long time for a ban on imitation guns, and I welcome the clause. I certainly believe that it should stand part of the Bill.