The head of Britain’s leftist Labour Party has called for even more gun control in the United Kingdom after a shooting in Sadiq Khan’s London.
Sir Keir Starmer, the head of Britain’s Labour Party, has publicly called for politicians to examine putting in place further gun control regulations in Britain after a drive-by shooting outside a church in London.
The attack on Saturday, which may be linked to the activities of a notorious Columbian drug cartel, resulted in the injury of four women and two girls, with one seven-year-old being left in critical condition as a result of the shooting.
However, despite it yet to be confirmed whether or not the gun involved in the shooting was legally owned or otherwise, Starmer openly said that he would like to see Britain’s extremely draconian gun control laws tightened even further in the wake of the attack.
“We have these incidents from time to time with guns… and every time there is, there’s evidence which I am concerned about that people have access to guns that they shouldn’t have access to,” Starmer claimed in an interview with the LBC radio station.
Although admitting that this is often a result of illegal gun ownership, he said that there nevertheless needs to be “better checks” on the legal “circulation” of firearms.
“I think we need to look again as to whether those laws are strong enough,” he said, before adding that “there are many illegally owned guns out there, and there are legally owned guns which I don’t think should be in the hands of the people who are legally owning them”.
While Starmer went on to insist that he did not want to see an outright ban on the ownership of firearms in Britain — saying that there are “farmers etcetera” who should be allowed to hold such a weapon — he did emphasise that, under his premiership, he would see guns in Britain subject to even “tighter control”.
However, for many British gun owners, there are not many ownership rights that are around to take away, with the UK taking an extremely heavy-handed approach regarding the regulation of the ownership of firearms over the last one hundred years.
The country’s war against guns started in earnest in the early 20th century, with new curbs enacted in 1903 and 1920: before then, Britons could legally buy and own long arms without a license, only needing papers to carry them out of doors. Before 1903, this applied to handguns as well, but in any case, licenses were cheap and easy to obtain.
Such restrictions were tightened throughout the century until the end of the 1990s, with the 1997 Firearms Act effectively rendering the vast majority of handguns illegal in the country.
These restrictions do not seem to have done much good for criminality in Britain however, with police reportedly responding to over 13,000 knife-related incidents between October 2021 and June 2022 in London alone.