The true level of firearms crime in the gun-banning United Kingdom (UK) is far higher than the government admits in official statistics, The Sunday Telegraph revealed on Oct. 19.
The newspaper said figures that were to be published by the Home Office on Oct. 23 would massively understate the scale of the problem.
Data provided to The Sunday Telegraph by nearly every police force in England and Wales, under freedom of information laws, show that the number of firearms incidents dealt with by officers annually is 60% higher than figures stated by the Home Office.
Last year 5,600 firearms offenses were excluded from the official figures. It means that, whereas the Home Office said there were only 9,800 offenses in the 2007-8 period, the real total was around 15,400. The latest quarterly figures that were due to be released, would again exclude a significant number of incidents, the newspaper said.
The explanation for the gulf is that the government figures only include cases where guns are fired, used to “pistol whip” victims, or brandished as a threat.
Thousands of offenses including gun-smuggling and illegal possession of a firearm—which normally carries a minimum five-year jail sentence—are omitted from the Home Office’s headline count, raising questions about the reliability of government crime data.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “These alarming new figures not only highlight the appalling state of gun crime in this country, but also remind us just how poor the government’s statistics actually are.
“Crime statistics must also be compiled and published independent of the Home Office, and crime mapping rolled out so that people can have confidence in what they are being told about the state of crime in this country.”
In all, there were at least 5,612 offenses excluded from the Home Office’s official gun crime total last year, according to figures supplied by police forces. The true total number of excluded offenses will have been even higher, because two of the 43 forces in England and Wales, Thames Valley and Leicestershire, failed to hand over their data when asked to do so under the Freedom of Information Act, and a large urban force, Greater Manchester, provided incomplete statistics.