The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly .iii In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales roseâby 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.iv The shootings in a single week in the fall of 2003âof a Liverpool football player and two other men in a bar, of three men in a drive-by attack in Reading, of a 32-year-old builder leaving a health club in Hertfordshire, of a 64-year-old woman trying to protect her daughter during a Nottinghamshire burglaryâprovoked Oliver Letwin, shadow home secretary, to remark: âOne might have thought that this was Baghdad. In fact it‟s Blair‟s Britain.âv
