Quotes of the Day

At a meeting in the town hall of South London's Brixton neighborhood, community leaders voiced grief and rage over the Jan. 2 murder of two black teenage girls in Birmingham. "The horrendous barbarity of this crime ... left me feeling quite sick," said chairman Lee Jasper, a race-relations adviser to London Mayor Ken Livingstone. At a Whitehall summit called by Home Secretary David Blunkett, politicians, bureaucrats and police officers expressed grave concern over the latest crime statistics.

That both meetings, which took place last week, were about gun crimes is a rude shock for many Britons, shaking their smug self-image as a relatively gun-free society, far removed from those trigger-happy cowboys across the Atlantic. The Birmingham carnage — two girls died and two were injured in the cross-fire between two turf-warring gangs — was supposed to happen in places like Los Angeles or New York, not in British cities where the archetypal bobby goes unarmed.

But the Jan. 2 shootings and the gun-crime statistics don't surprise those who live in Britain's inner cities, where drug gangs, particularly Jamaican dealers, protect their multimillion pound profits with weapons ranging from replica pistols and modified air guns to lethal Uzi submachine guns. Jasper says guns, many smuggled in from the Balkans, are easily bought or rented, and that while the gangs are often homegrown, top killers, or "shottas," are sometimes flown in from Jamaica to carry out assassinations.

Although Britain's inner cities are not nearly as violent as America's, the combination of guns, drugs and gang culture makes for a volatile atmosphere. In gangland interactions, perceived slights — over an inadequate display of "respect," say — can bring the guns out. One young Londoner says many of her friends have stopped going to parties because even a spilled drink can lead to a shooting. Police say some black inner-city youths use guns as fashion accessories. In London last year, 20 of the city's 22 gun homicides were the result of black-on-black crime. Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democrat frontbench M.P. for a South London constituency, says "the culture isn't limited to youngsters of Caribbean extraction but is spreading out into other black communities, and into Turkish and Balkan ones."

While last week's headlines prompted calls for stronger action against gangs, the government's first reaction was to lash out at the most predictable target. Culture Secretary Kim Howells suggested that rap groups, in particular London's garage collective So Solid Crew, were at least partly to blame. Three of the 30-member band have been arrested on separate gun charges. "Idiots like the So Solid Crew are glorifying gun culture and violence," Howells fumed. Home Secretary David Blunkett suggested holding talks with music industry executives about "what is and what isn't acceptable" in song lyrics. But few people were buying that lame old line. "So Solid Crew might not be setting a good example," says Mike Franklin, a member of London's Lambeth community-police consultative group, "but no one is driven to murder by rap lyrics."

More substantive proposals emerged from Blunkett's confab with police officials, including tough new measures against guns. The officials discussed greater protection for witnesses, and an amnesty for those who turn in illegal weapons. Blunkett promised a ban on carrying replica weapons and air guns in public, and to raise the allowable age for owning an air gun from 14 to 17. He also announced a new minimum five-year sentence for illegal possession of a gun, which he said "will send a clear message that serious, violent offending will invariably be dealt with in the strongest manner."

At the emotionally charged Brixton meeting, Clarence Thompson, who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean 40 years ago, said five years was too mild a punishment. "Give them life — if they carry a gun they mean to kill," he said to applause. For the government, the strength of public feeling on the subject is an uncomfortable reminder of an old promise unkept. In the early '90s, Tony Blair famously vowed that in power, Labour would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." The delivery time for that promise is now running out.

• HELEN GIBSON/London
• Soaring gun crime prompts public rage and tough new laws