The multicultural city of Birmingham, England, experienced four shooting incidents over a three-day period, one of them fatal.
The city, home to large and often overlapping immigrant heritage populations, saw three people hospitalised by gunfire from Thursday to Saturday and one man killed, BirminghamLive reports.
In the small hours of Thursday, July 7th, a 30-year-old man who has been named as Mohammed Kasim was shot in a car along with another man in the Small Heath area, where over half the population are of Pakistani heritage, compared to well under a tenth who are classed as White British.
Kasim died in the car park outside Heartlands Hospital, after managing to drive their despite his injuries, while his companion was hospitalised.
Shortly after noon the same day a 19-year-old presented at hospital with a gunshot wound to his leg, received on Clissold Street, Ladywood, with police receiving reports of gunshots in a separate incident — in which no one was injured — some time afterwards.
Another two men, aged 22 and 21, were hospitalised after being shot on Wheeler Street in Newtown, on Saturday when it was not yet 5 p.m., and would have been light out.
Gun control laws in the United Kingdom are draconian, with pistols all but totally outlawed and semi-automatic and pump-action rifles also heavily restricted.
Defence of one’s person or home are not regarded as valid reasons for applying for a shotgun or firearms certificate, with would-be gun owners required to justify their applications on grounds such as hunting or sport shooting.
Indeed, Britons are not even allowed to carry cans of pepper spray — bizarrely classed as firearms under the relevant legislation — in order to defend themselves.
Nevertheless — and despite Great Britain being harder to smuggle weapons to as an island state — gun crime rose significantly in the years following the then-Labour government’s landmark handgun ban in 1999, and police forces uncovering prohibited weapons including AK-47s and Skorpion machine pistols is not unheard of.
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