Nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was murdered in her Merseyside home on August 22, 2022, the innocent victim of what has been reported to be a confrontation between two people which had spilled from the streets of Liverpool into her family’s house. The child’s mother was also wounded.
In the wake of Pratt-Korbel’s tragic death, news reports have focused on the extent of gun crime in the UK. A recent report in the Guardian revealed that Home Office figures show an increase in recorded gun crime in two-thirds of police force areas in England and Wales.
Government statistics show that for the year ending March 2021, the number of offences in which firearms (excluding airguns) were reported by the police in England and Wales to have caused injury stood at 5,709. Out of 5.4 million total recorded offences, that represents only 0.1% of recorded crime. The numbers also show that gun crime has generally been falling overall since around 2004.
