Gun crime is being exported from the inner cities to the shires, the senior officer in charge of the national firearms policing strategy has told The Times.

Keith Bristow, lead officer on firearms crime for the Association of Chief Police Officers, was speaking as Scotland Yard battled to contain the violence in London, where one man was shot dead and another injured over the weekend.

A man in his twenties was admitted to hospital yesterday with a leg wound after a shooting on Harrow Road in the west of the capital. It followed the fatal shooting on Saturday of a 28-year-old man in Homerton, East London. Three others were wounded in shootings in Manchester.

The latest attacks came after a spate of shootings in South London in less than a fortnight, including the murders of three teenage boys.

But as the death toll mounted in the capital, Mr Bristow gave warning that the gun problem was moving to the shires. The proportion of gun crime occurring outside the hotspots of London, Birmingham and Manchester has risen sharply from 36 per cent in 2002-03 to 45 per cent in 2004-05.

The spread of gangs and guns to smaller cities and provincial towns went “hand in hand” with the expanding market for crack cocaine, said Mr Bristow, who attributed the displacement in part to a tough police response in the big cities.

But it is presenting smaller forces with a new challenge. Suffolk police are investigating the murder of a 24-year-old man in a nightclub shoot-out in December. No one has been arrested but detectives believe that the killer is linked to a South London gang.

In Reading, where London gangs dominate the drug trade, a man was seriously wounded in another nightclub shooting in December, and last week gunmen with London accents carried out a number of robberies in Cardiff.

Sussex police say that children as young as 11 are committing offences using imitation guns. Police in Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire have appealed to parents not to buy imitation firearms and ball-bearing, or BB, guns for children.

“There is some evidence that gun crime is moving from the cities to the shires,” Mr Bristow, who is also Chief Constable of Warwickshire, told The Times.

“This is partly because of robust policing and partly because of the spread of drug markets. The typical pattern is that a crack dealer establishes a trade in an area but, when that becomes saturated, it generates competition and violence between drug dealers and more robust policing. These factors force some of the dealers to go elsewhere in search of new markets. They bring their guns with them.” He cautioned against the view that firearms were only a problem for the black community. “It is much more about where you went to school and whom you hang out with than about ethnicity.”

Despite the events of the past month, he said that there was

optimism that gun violence was falling. The latest figures showed a 14 per cent fall in firearms offences. “We are very optimistic the big increases in gun crime which took place in the late 1990s are a thing of the past,” he said.

The solutions

“ We have got to analyse what is going wrong here. Is it a general state of British society?The night London gangs brought murder to a club And I think it isn’t. It is about a specific problem within a specific criminal culture to do with guns and gangs.

— Tony Blair

“ Surely no one imagines we can stop crimes like this simply with better policing or better gun control? The problem lies within families and communities — and so does the solution.

— David Cameron

“ Kids aren’t bothered about a five-year minimum sentence. Ten years, and life that means life if you use it, that would deter a lot of kids.

— Janice Collins, Mothers Against Guns

“ As parents we have to take responsibility for our children and go out there and get them back in. We have to discipline our kids, be involved in their lives, watch them like a hawk, and be parents.

— Mica Paris, singer and sister of gun victim

“ The victims were from Caribbean, African, white and Asian backgrounds. There has been speculation that some of the offenders were white. If this is the case, we must assume that g=un crime has spread to all races.

— Rev Nims Obunge, Peace Alliance

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