Reports of stolen shotguns have remained at significantly reduced levels since May 2020, according to Christian Ashwell, head of threat for criminal use of firearms at the National Crime Agency (NCA).
“We’ve been tracking these numbers since 2019,” says Ashwell. “We’ve watched the state of shotgun theft go down since early 2020 when the pandemic first started. We thought this was obvious, the pandemic meant that there were fewer burglars around, however, the numbers never recovered and we’re now at an average of 14 per month, down from 40 pre-pandemic.”
Ashwell noted that the use of shotguns by criminals has decreased across the country. The NCA worked with the Gun Trade Association (GTA) to investigate why shotguns were being stolen. They found that these thefts were often opportunistic. Typically, gun safes are angle-grinded off the wall and in rare instances where mistakes by owners were observed, it was usually simple oversights like leaving the safe keys on top of the safe. “Burglars are opportunists; if they go in to steal money or laptops and see your gun safe with a key in the lock, they might think the guns could be worth a lot of money,” Ashwell explained.
The reduction in thefts is attributed to several factors, including more people working from home, and the increased accessibility and affordability of alarms, CCTV, and Ring doorbells. General burglary rates have also shown
similar trends.
“The great news here is that I present this information to ministers and essentially say, ‘You do not need to go and ban firearms’. I am here to prevent criminal use and make sure that the right people have firearms and not the wrong people. We work closely with the GTA and RFDs, because firearms are lawful. We want to make sure we work with you, the community, to ensure your businesses are not negatively affected by any decisions made,” Ashwell stated.
The National Crime Agency leads the UK’s fight to cut serious and organised crime, protecting the public by targeting and pursuing those criminals who pose the greatest risk to the UK.
Firearm discharges remain supressed since September 2022, a 36 per cent decrease on typical levels seen until December 2020.
“Every day we get a report of every firearms incident in the country, so I can tell you that our seizure and recovery of firearms have gone up. Which is good news, as is the number of discharges and injuries. This means that the guns criminals have either don’t fire, won’t fire, or are imitation. When they do fire a weapon they’re not injuring people as often; they are not as accurate, so there’s some good news here,” Ashwell concluded.
If you notice attempts at firearms, ammunition and component acquisition that could be used for the purposes of supporting serious and organised crime please contact FIR@nca.gov.uk
