The Prime Minister has described the loss of lives through gun crime as “intolerable” and warned of “severe penalties” for offenders.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Tony McNulty, Minister of State for Policing:
I’m Tony McNulty. I’m the Minister for Police. We’ve just finished, I’ve just finished with the Prime Minister a trip here to Manchester to see a lot of the very, very good work that’s going on in Moss Side, in Hulme, all around the issue of gun crime and young people. And there’s lots of really enthusiastic people here from across all agencies, particularly the last part of our visit, at the Multi Agency forum in Manchester. Lots of people doing lots of good work, trying to deter young people from the path of criminality in the first place and, as importantly, helping both young people who are victims and young people who are perpetrators, get back to a life, hopefully, that will include education, training skills and all the other things they’ve missed by slipping, hopefully, momentarily down the road to criminality. I know the Prime Minister was impressed. I’ve been very impressed.
Gordon Brown:
What we’ve got to do is to make sure that any young person who’s thinking of holding a gun, harbouring a gun, holding it for a brother, holding it for a relative, knows that they will be punished very severely for it. So punishment is an important part of sending the message that guns are completely unacceptable to the population of this city, and to every part of the country. Then we’ve got to use, as has happened here, an approach that brings in all the different agencies, where someone’s in a young offenders’ institution or on probation or has been in trouble, we work on them so that they are in a position to recognise that there are alternatives to this gun and gang culture. We’ve got to work on young people who are in danger of falling into these gangs. We’ve got to work with the parents to persuade them that it’s important that they don’t let their children get into this gun and gang culture. So it’s an intensive programme right across the community where I believe you need all agencies working together and you need a determination on the part of the community itself, which exists in Manchester to stop the supply and use of guns in the area. Since the beginning of the summer, what we’ve decided on is very intensive and continuous work. This is not a one-day thing; this is not a three-month thing. This is intensive work to stop the supply of guns, to stop people harbouring guns, to have intrusive policing if necessary so that the public are protected against particularly those young people in whom the huge danger exists that they will use guns indiscriminately and not know precisely the effects that they may have by their actions. We’ve got to take action right across the board to prevent people both having guns and using guns.
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