Wanna Hear a Conspiracy Theory?

The United Kingdom has some of the highest levels of gun crime in Europe yet it has some of the tightest gun control laws in the world. All automatic weapons are banned. All handguns are banned and even pump action shotguns are banned. Really the only guns you can legally own are low calibre rifles and double barreled shotguns that can only be loaded with birdshot. To get a license for either of these you not only need to prove that you are a person of good character and sound mind you also need to prove that you have a legitimate need for every weapon you intend to own. You also need to give the police prior permission to enter your home at any time to inspect those weapons and how they are being stored.

Yet we still manage to average around one fatal shooting per week in London alone.

Strangely the reason for this contradiction of violence seems to lie in the Northern Irish peace process. It is widely known that during the Troubles Loyalist paramilitaries were able to fund their terrorist activities through drug dealing in mainland British cities like Liverpool and Manchester. It is also well known that Loyalist paramilitaries were armed, in part at least, by the British Security Service, MI5, often using British Army stock. When the peace process began in the late 1990's and the paramilitaries started to decommission their weapons the Republicans were forced to account for every single item in their arsenals and have the destruction of those items witnessed by independent observers. The Loyalists though were simply asked to give their word and "decommissioned" their weapons by selling them along the drugs network to criminal gangs in the north of England in and around Liverpool and Manchester.

Suddenly having gained access to military grade firepower and discovering that they'd become the retirement plan for Loyalist paramilitaries these criminal gangs began to very violently expand their territory down south towards London. This gave the southern drugs gangs a simple choice. They could either take up arms themselves or get wiped out. That choice was made much simpler because it coincided with the introduction of the EU's open borders policy. That made it much easier for the southern gangs to smuggle in less powerful guns from continental Europe.

All of a sudden the midlands region of the UK around Birmingham and Nottingham became the frontline in this battle and the myth of black on black gun crime was born.

Of course this only a conspiracy if two or more members of MI5 got together and helped to make it happen knowing that if all those poor people killed each other then the state wouldn't have to explain why it couldn't find jobs for them.