爱豆传媒

Professor Peter Squires, 爱豆传媒's Professor of Criminology, said secret caches of weapons hidden in homes are more common than people think.

He said: "Guns are owned by collectors, people who are just fascinated by them, and there are those who like to have them for security – they feel reassured that they have a weapon they could turn to if they found themselves threatened.

"These firearms have been illegal in England, Wales and Scotland since 1998 – and possession of them carries stiff penalties – and despite numerous amnesties and police appeals to hand them in, there are still many out there in the community.

"While most will never come into the public domain, some often find their way into the hands of criminals."

Professor Squires said the revolver which was branded by one of the attackers of trooper Lee Rigby in London in May last year was a 1912 Belgian infantry officer's pistol from World War One. He asked: "Where had it been for the last 100 years?"

One of the most frequently misused types of illegal firearm in England, he said, is a converted, so-called 'alarm pistol', produced legally as a 'crime prevention' tool in Eastern Europe. Again, Professor Squires asked: "Where are they converted, by whom, and how do they get here?"

The cache of firearms found in Brighton by Sussex Police

Professor Peter Squires

The Brighton arsenal was discovered when police were called to the home of a man who had died. Officers were shocked to find the size of the haul and that some of the weapons were loaded.

Professor Squires asked: "How did the anonymous Brighton resident amass for himself a stock of weapons – in a country with what are said to be some of the toughest gun controls in the world?"

Professor Squires has written about secret caches in his latest book just published, Gun Crime in Global Contexts, in which he estimates there are in the order of 850 million firearms in the world today – one for every seven people on the planet – and the majority, 650 million, are in the hands of civilians.

He has been working on the book for four years and compares gun control regimes in countries such as the UK and wider Europe – where gun laws are tight and gun violence relatively rare – with countries like the USA, South Africa and, topically, Brazil, where illegal weapons are commonplace and gun murders frequent, and with conflict zones and failed states in parts of Africa and Central America where "gun violence is endemic and life is, apparently, cheap".

Most of those firearms in the world today, he said, were produced in and supplied by developed first world countries, the "so-called civilised societies".

Professor Squires said: "These guns cause panic in the streets when they are criminally misused in the safe European democracies but they are directly responsible for 750,000 deaths and countless more injuries when they are employed in the poorest parts of the world.

"Compounding the inequalities, it is mainly men who own these weapons: the international evidence demonstrates clearly that highly-weaponised communities are vastly more dangerous for women and girls."

Professor Squires said firearm proliferation is now understood to be a direct contributor to regional conflicts and crime in both the safest and most dangerous societies in the world. His book brings together a series of inter-disciplinary perspectives, from criminology to peace studies, "to understand the inter-related dynamics of supply and demand which are weaponising the world".