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Children, 13, being maimed as gun gangs fire warning shots
Sophie Goodchild, Justin Davenport and Ellen Widdup10 Aug 2009
Gun gangs involved in “turf wars” across London are inflicting “war wounds” on schoolchildren as young as 13.
Doctors today warned dozens of teenagers
have been treated for gunshot wounds.
Rivals are firing at the arms and legs of victims to settle scores or send them a message warning them off their turf'.
Medics warn this dangerous new trend to maim children could turn fatal if a patient bled to death.
Trauma expert Dr Tunji Lasoye, from King's College Hospital, said it was "desperately" worrying that children were being targeted.
The doctor said staff at King's had operated on 15 children including at least one thirteen-year-old.
He said: "Seven or eight years ago you would only see these injuries on hardened youths and those in their twenties. But now it is desperately worrying that we are seeing them in children as young as 13.
"It's not that numbers are rising, it's the fact we're dealing with children at all. Until recently I can't recall ever treating a gunshot patient under the age of 20. It's shocking that anyone gets involved with guns but it's even more shocking it's now a much younger person."
Detectives also report an increase in the number of non-fatal shootings and that gun crime has been rising in London in recent months.
One detective experienced in tackling armed gangs said some of the wounds were also self-inflicted by gang members pulling a gun out of their waistband and accidentally firing the weapon.
He said: "You get kids playing around with guns or pulling it out of their waistband and it goes off. Whenever we get bullets in the foot or the groin its a good indication that it was self-inflicted."
New figures from NHS trusts reveal that one in fourteen of all recorded cases of gun injuries involve children.
A total of 588 patients were treated for gunshot wounds over the past five years in London including 99 teenagers under the age of 18 - 42 of whom were 16 or younger.
There has been growing concern over the number of children involved in gun and knife crime in recent years.
Last year a 14-year-old boy was found guilty of possessing a semi-automatic pistol in Deptford.
Figures obtained by the Standard two years ago showed that in one eight month period a total of 321 children were injured in shootings, 39 of them seriously.
In 2007 eight teenagers were shot dead and last year three died from gunshot wounds.
So far this year only one teenager has died in a firearms murder and there have been hopes that police are achieving success in tackling gangs.
Abdulkarim Boudiaf, 18, who was planning to be a lawyer, was an innocent bystander in a pub in Tottenham when he was shot dead in March. Police believe it was a case of mistaken identity.
However there has been a jump in low-level gun crime generally in recent months.
Figures show there have been 831 offences since the start of the financial year in April compared to 767 last year. The figures cover all crimes in which a gun has been used, including robberies using imitation firearms.
Staff at King's have not had to amputate the limbs of any gunshot patients because surgeons have been successful in reconnecting severed tendons and nerves
But Dr Lasoye warned it was only a matter of time before a victim lost an arm or leg - or their life.
He said: "The worst case scenario would be a fatality. A limb wound doesn't have to be life-threatening but all is takes is for a major vessel to severe and the victim ends up emptying all their blood volume over the floor.
"I'm sure there will also be cases where limbs will have to be amputated in future. The children we've seen always say the wound was an accident but it becomes pretty obvious when you see the bullet on the X-ray.
"Child protection is key - many of these victims have difficult home circumstances so we always ensure they are seen by a youth worker or social worker."
Reader views (35)
Some people making comments on this thread simply don't have a clue. Completely misinformed!!
There may well be pockets of disproportionately high black on black gun or knife/drug crime but this is by far overwhelmed by robbery, burglary, mugging, vandalism, drunk and disorderly behaviour, etc etc. Go see for yourself. So to get worked up about the skin colour of the perpetrator is to miss the point completely as well as being an act of self delusion.
My strong opinion is that we should be channeling our energies into (a) punishing those perpetrators of crimes, i.e., those individuals that are already 'broken' or 'damaged' - perhaps we have to face up to the fact that rehabilitation is not always possible and (b) introducing mentoring schemes and strategies to help those YOUNGER members of the community that *could*, without help or support, so easily slip into a life of crime as they grow into their older years and (c) not being over-reliant on the government to singularly come up with some miraculous answer and think what WE can do to combat the issue on a personal level in our everyday dealings with young people.
The biggest influence on the growing lives of the young is and always has been the parent. So exactly how do you think many of these kids are growing into the so horribly despised individuals they have become??
- Don, Birmingham (ex London), 11/08/2009 09:26
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Veritas Noire (nice one on the ID, btw) - read the substance of my post, not an out of context snippet - which was the point of what I was saying to Henry. "Black on Black' crime is hugely out of proportion to the general national crime statistics. There IS a problem there - which is why the police look there. If they didn't make their checks according to the likelihood of finding problems, in the problem areas, then they would be expending effort and man-hours doing window dressing PC 'proportionate' investigations rather than targeted criminal investigations.
There ARE white and mixed gangs - they are known and are targeted too. The 'black' gangs are the most numerous in Britain's supposedly 'white' society which means they do a disportionate percentage of the crimes. That is reality. It doesn't make the 'white/mixed' gangs less criminal - they just don't get the 'press' that the black gangs do simply because of the numbers of incidents involved.
That isn't racism. If anything, blame the 'gangstas' themselves - as you should be doing in the first place.
- Rogan, Irving, 10/08/2009 21:20
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I'm with Henry. It’s so easy to demonise All black youth because of the mindless actions of relative few scumbags. Lock them up and throw away the key! No one has a problem with that but don't blame All black youths or the whole black community. Without a doubt the overwhelming majority of paedophiles are white males. Fact. Name a prominent black paedophile in the UK. Bet you can’t. The list of white paedophiles is endless! Yet, no one talks about profiling all white males or demonising the whole white community. If you are going to dish it out you have to take it too. By the way, a recent court case found two white men from Kent were major suppliers of guns to criminal gangs in London. They got light sentences. Anyway, whatever their race criminals need tougher sentencing. Life should mean life for murderers, rapists and child abusers! Carry a weapon and its 10 to 20 years.
- Veritas Noire, Purley, 10/08/2009 19:19
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Barry, Woking - Your ignorance of the Human Rights Act 2008 (HRA) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is breathtaking. It does not prevent prosecution of those who are guilty of committing crime at all. I suggest you read Articles 2, 5, 6 and 7 of the ECHR which have been in UK law since October 2000. You will see that there is no bar to the guilty being punished. What it tries to achieve is a lessening of miscarriages of justice from sloppy police work.
- Annoyed Of Croydon, London, 10/08/2009 18:52
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the weapons these people use are there minds, these are supplied to them by the society that nurtured them.
- Michael, london, 10/08/2009 17:25
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Alan, London - you are aware of the European Court of Human Rights and the work that it does in order to make it almost immpossible to punish an offender without breaching their 'uman Wites init? I suppose in your mind that doesn't make the EU to blame because of course you live in blameless cloud cookoo land along with the rest of the offender hugging liberals
- Barry, woking, GB, 10/08/2009 16:33
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Thomas Hayes, the guns are mostly being supplied by Jamaican Yardies. That's the main reason gun crime is overwhelmingly black, because the Yardies (obviously) operate in black areas.
- Kevin T, Beckenham, Kent, 10/08/2009 16:22
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"The vast majority of gun crime is black so what are the left wing do gooders going say about that?"
Why, they will try and turn your words back on you in some nonsensical fashion just like Henry, London did.
Answer to Henry - they do what they do with black paedophiles too - they hunt them down and convict them. This doesn't alter the fact that the MAJORITY of violent crimes are being carried out by 'black' (of all shades and varieties) gangs - primarily against 'black' communities and rivals. How having the police trying to intervene and reduce this problem is 'racism' somehow eludes me.
Being the victim of aggressors is without choice. Being a gang member is a choice. Being a violent aggressor is a choice. Being a drug-pusher/pimp/thief/murderer/rapist/anything else - is a choice, no matter what race classification you hide behind. There are consequences to all choices made.
- Rogan, Irving, 10/08/2009 16:12
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We don't have a "do-gooder" approach to crime in this country, there are currently more people in prison than there have ever been. There is a clear link between poverty, unemployment and crime. Solving the first two will massively cut the last. The problem is that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger, not smaller.
There's no point going on about capital or corporal punishment, they aren't coming back so get used to it. You may have noticed that they have the death penalty in the USA - and life imprisonment without parole - yet this does not stop violent crime. The answers don't lie in caning or killing people. First and foremost, the police aren't actually very good at catching criminals!
- Nolan, Londonist, 10/08/2009 16:07
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Bring back asylums and put these IDIOTS away for life.
Beef up LAW AND ORDER i.e give the coppers guns and let them sort these little scumbags out..........
Bring back hanging too.
- Chester Chris, Chester, 10/08/2009 15:50
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Nolan, Londonist
Get your head out of the sand (again) and look at the point I made in reply to Henry's post.
- Mark, South-East London, 10/08/2009 15:43
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Alan: No I am not getting confused. We cannot reinstate corporal and capital punishment back into this country because Jack Straw signed away our rights to it within the EU quite a few years ago now.
- Sue, Orpington, Kent, 10/08/2009 15:43
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Mr Patton, please why are you so ignorant, why do you think people in gangs are black, you need to wake up my friend, they are all different colours, Pity the goverment gives them a slap on the hand, No, give them 10 years with parole, the system in England is wrong.
Simple, the Government offers nopthing for youth from 13 years and upwards, where do these kids go after college, then society don't acccept these kids.
We have to deter crime, give tougher sentences to these kids, like they done with Ronnie Biggs, 30 years for armed robbery, how many robberies do you hear about now?
- Adrian, london
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I'm certainly not ignorant-far from it. Read Marks below response which sums it up in a couple of sentences.
The VAST majority of gun and gang crime in London is black. It's not down to poverty but lack of decent parenting and black fathers leaving the family unit You can check the statistics yourself on-line.
We must stop pussy-footing around the problem and deal with the problem head on. As I said and from the majority of responses, people are fed-up with crime and the attitude of the black community.
- Mike Patton, London, 10/08/2009 15:31
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I agree with Sue, the softly softly approach and bleeding do-gooders has done our children and no favours whatsoever.
Bring back the cane and much stronger discipline at school, backed up by the cane.
If a school head decides that somebody needs to be expelled, this should only be overruled in the most exceptional circumstances, and not by local authorities who would otherwise have to find additional funds for educating the miscreant, and malcontent. For them, there does need to be particular schooling arrangements, with an even stricter regime of punishments, backed up by, if necessary, liberal use of the cane for even minor infractions
The cane (pain) is a marvellous deterrent (other than for the hardened bad cases), it certainly teaches respect for authority and it certainly did me no harm.
There are always going to be some who are not afraid of the cane, indeed the number of cuts that they get, the more the better, is almost a badge of honour. It will considerably reduce the number of miscreants.
- Hugh, Middx, 10/08/2009 15:14
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As someone who has worked in so called "youth justice" for 15 years I have to agree with some of the other comments expressed here. It is widely acknowledged that violent crime involving guns is almost exclusive to Afro-Carribeans living in Britain. The so called "youth justice" system I have mentioned is pathetically liberal and most offenders are given pitifully leniant sentences for numerous offences before they graduate on to gun crime. All the measures proposed by successive tory and labour governments are only tinkering around the edges of a cultural deficit which will be rectified only by massive cultural changes and a massive increase in stop and search combined with much more severe mandatory prison sentences for posession and use of weapons. Liberals who have little contact with such criminals seem to have a romanticed idea of how these people are in some way victims of their circumstances. They are NOT victims and most of them are incapable of feeling any empathy or compassion for others. They are soley concerned with their own reputation and have an inverted logic whereby being ruthless is seen as something to aspire to. By clamping down on such criminals a message would be sent out to many more and many lives could be saved. By continuing to promote the culture of victimhood and blaming everything on racism, liberals are condemning many more people to death and banging the nails in the coffins of our inner cities
- Patricia Neville, Peckham, 10/08/2009 14:50
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Perhaps the point Henry is trying to make is that race only seems to be an issue when a crime involves people from minority communities. When criminals are white (e.g Ian Huntley, Steve Wright, Levi Bellfield) this is never considered a white issue that white people should sort out.
- Nolan, Londonist, 10/08/2009 14:03
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Two solutions
Send all men found with weapons, of any sort, of to fight a war somewhere, let them see and try the real thing.
But for preference, leave a whole load of them locked in a warehouse with a loaded gun each, the last one alive serves a prison sentence - lets save money on pampering this scum.
- Jams, London, 10/08/2009 13:57
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Sue of Orpington: even the most rabit hater of the EU and all its doings would surely have trouble pinning this particular problem (or its solution) on the EU. You may (well) be confusing with the ECHR which is of course a separate matter e.g. Russia and Turkey (ho ho ho) are in the latter but not the former.
- Alan, London, 10/08/2009 13:44
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Mr Patton, please why are you so ignorant, why do you think people in gangs are black, you need to wake up my friend, they are all different colours, Pity the goverment gives them a slap on the hand, No, give them 10 years with parole, the system in England is wrong.
Simple, the Government offers nopthing for youth from 13 years and upwards, where do these kids go after college, then society don't acccept these kids.
We have to deter crime, give tougher sentences to these kids, like they done with Ronnie Biggs, 30 years for armed robbery, how many robberies do you hear about now?
- Adrian, london, 10/08/2009 13:42
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Thomas Hayes,
If its not guns its knives, baseball bats, planks of wood, broken bottles, fists and feet. Who supplies these?
- David, London, 10/08/2009 13:41
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Henry, this is overly reductive and simplistic view. Guns and gangs spring from a context where poverty, family breakdown and lack of opportunities are rife. Geographically, this tends to be in inner-cities which are predominantly non-white. If you grew up in those communities you would realise that, like everyone at the end of the day, the young people here want to have a viable economic future and the respect of their peers. Unfortunately, the inner-city education system fails these kids + their parents can't afford to send their kids to schools where they might get an education that would allow them to escape their situation. Consequently, the professions that middle-class white kids might eventually be drawn into are not open. The girls will typically become pregnant in order to secure public housing and young males will drift into crime (particularly drugs) because drug-dealing is perceived to be a viable and profitable 'profession'. And so the generational curse goes on. But there is nothing essentially 'different' about these kids however much you might like to think so. You would have the same responses if you had grown up in this context. Sending them to prison will take them off the street for a while but when let out their views will be more firmly entrenched and they'll feel even more disenfranchised than before. It is this desperation that tragically causes them to pick up a gun as a desperate bid to assert themselves in a world which has written them off.
- John, London, 10/08/2009 13:40
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The only real answer is the punishment must fit the crime. Have a vote amongst ordinary citizens to bring back hanging, hard labour and bread and water diats. You'd be amazed at the result.
- Never Eat Tuna Again, London, 10/08/2009 13:27
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The question is,where are these guns coming from and who supplies them to children
T H Leeds
- Thomas Hayes, Leeds UK, 10/08/2009 13:01
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The problem here is these people have no fear of the police, the law, or any authority. Their only fear is other idiots with weapons.
The only solution is make them fear the law more. You're caught with a gun, you should get 20 years automatically - no exceptions. You're caught with a knife, 10 years automatically - no exceptions.
See what effect that has.
- Kevin T, Beckenham, Kent, 10/08/2009 12:53
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There are too many members of the 'bleedin heart' campaign in this country. Come out the EU. Bring back corporal and capital punishment. Bread and water in HM Prisons, make doing time a living hell - Law and order restored in the UK - simples!!
- Sue, Orp;ington, Kent, 10/08/2009 12:42
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The sooner we stop playing games trotting out the same boring old rhetoric based on issues of skin colour, the sooner we'll get closer to sorting this problem.
Poor parenting is part of the problem. Lack of positive male role models is part of the problem. Societies all pervasive hatred of children is part of the problem. Societal ignorance surrounding the importance of the family (and extended family) is part of the problem.
In other words, WE'RE all part of the problem. So the sooner we stop accusing others and begin looking at ourselves, things will being to get better.
- Don, birmingham (ex-Londoner), 10/08/2009 12:03
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Henry, you do black male youth no favours with your comments. Are you saying that we should not be concerned with black-on-black gun-crime because child-molesters tend to be white? What point are you trying to make here?
- Mike B, London, 10/08/2009 11:36
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Henry,
The vast majority of peadophiles are white because the vast majority of men in this country are white, whereas the amount of violent crime committed by young blacks is disproportionate to their make-up of the population! Fact!
- Mark, South-East London, 10/08/2009 11:33
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henry: Firstly you should spell the word paedophile right. Secondly, it's not a white problem about child abuse so god knows where you got your data from. Maybe you just guessed?
- Mike Patton, London, 10/08/2009 11:29
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The parents need to take some blame. Target the parents by heavy fines and imprisonment. Threaten to throw them out of their council flats if their children are found handling guns or any crime and deport the parents and the born in the UK children to the parents country of origin. The rest, send them to formal colonial countries and tell them to go and handle themselves in those countries. You would see a fall in crime once people knew the consequences, there are no none at the moment. Tough action needs to be taken.
- Frank, Copenhagen, Denmark, 10/08/2009 11:08
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The white community needs to wake and deal with this quick because society will turn their back on them. What annoys me is that this community cries racism when stop and searches is conducted mainly against them. The vast majority of peadophiles are white so what are the right wing do gooders going say about that?
- Henry, London, 10/08/2009 10:47
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One detective experienced in tackling armed gangs said some of the wounds were also self-inflicted by gang members pulling a gun out of their waistband and accidentally firing the weapon.
Good. Hope it hurts.
- Jimbob, Kensington, 10/08/2009 10:42
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When you pussy-foot around ethnic groups, then you simply cannot hope to deal with the real issues in a society.
- Frank, Home Counties, England., 10/08/2009 09:44
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When I see criminals who are also gun victims whilst on A&E duty, I have to admit, despite my profession oath, I don't mind if some of these scum bleed to death. Saves the hassle of a trial at least.
- Dr. Jonathan Melvin, Dublin, 10/08/2009 09:40
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The black community needs to wake and deal with this quick because society will turn their back on them. What annoys me is that this community cries racism when stop and searches is conducted mainly against them but this is why. The vast majority of gun crime is black so what are the left wing do gooders going say about that?
- Mike Patton, London, 10/08/2009 09:24
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