NORTHAMPTON, England – Josh Bains was 28 when he was assassinated after an argument over a drug debt of about $ 50 just a few miles from the English village where he grew up – with a gun that had traveled thousands of miles from America.
His was one of a growing number of cannon fodder in recent years that the British authorities have been concerned about an expanding smuggling pipeline from the United States. The rifle that Mr Bains killed in October 2018 – a Taurus Model 85 – is directly banned in Britain.
“I think Americans would not believe that something they produce can affect people like us,” said Clare Bains, who is the stepmother of Mr. Bains was. “If there were not all these guns, they would not be drinking from America all over the world.”
Rifles remain extremely rare in Britain, and very few people, even policemen, carry firearms. But the growing presence of U.S. weapons on the streets, which has not been widely reported before, comes as serious violent crime, such as murder and stabbings, has gone up sharply.
Most illegal firearms in Britain still come from Europe. But investigators last year produced hundreds of smuggled American guns, a small figure by international standards, although experts say the number the police did not discover is likely to be much higher.
The British police have withdrawn some of the smuggled American rifles to loosely regulated rifle knives in states like Florida. Investigators have also seized American weapons that were smuggled into a container ship and hidden in cars.
Now the authorities fear that after Brexit, if borders with the European Union will be more strictly regulated, the illegal gun trade from America could be accelerated, especially given the broad support of the Trump administration for the gun industry.
“A key Trump administration goal is to globalize the trade in firearms and facilitate exports, and if you facilitate legal exports, it is almost impossible that there will be an illegal proliferation of weapons in criminal markets in other countries,” Aaron Karp said. a senior advisor for the survey on small arms in Geneva and a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
The United States is one of the largest legal exporters of firearms in the world, but hundreds of thousands of guns are also leaking out of the country illegally and fueling homicides, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In Britain, criminal groups mainly use knives for acts of violence. Knife crime reached a record high last year, killing about two out of every five murderers. By comparison, only 33 people were killed with a gun.
But the number of illegal guns in circulation is growing. In the last year alone, gun seizures by the UK National Crime Agency, the National Crime Agency, have more than doubled, and firearms cases have risen by 38 percent since 2015. Authorities are concerned that violence could escalate as criminal groups switch from knives to guns. A BBC investigation linked a firearm to 11 different weapons and multiple murders over a six-year period.
“The murder rate is already a problem without easy access to guns,” said Robert McLean, a British crime investigator based at the University of the West of Scotland. “Once in circulation, a firearm can move around criminal networks and can be used in a number of shootings and murders.”
In many cases, the trade in smuggled cannons is fueled by gangs transporting drugs from cities to smaller towns and rural areas – known as ‘county line’ gangs – such as killers of Mr. Bains.
In the last few years, the National Crime Agency has found that tires have favorite “cleaner” antique or deactivated weapons that are harder to detect. These weapons are sold legally at gun shows and by collectors, many in the United States, and are easier to buy because they can only be fired if they are illegally reactivated.
One former London federal leader and gun dealer said he had handled more than 50 firearms and sold many more to bands across Britain. Sometimes, he said, the smuggled guns had landed in the country inside boxes with highchairs.
“I got my first gun from one of my elders when I was 13, 14,” said the former federal leader, now 23, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid arrest or compensation of his old colleagues. He stepped down three years ago with the help of Gangsline, a London-based organization that helps allies commit crimes.
He recalls that he was warned that “if you have a knife and someone has a gun, he will not bother to shoot.” His band traded dozens of new and used weapons, including American Glocks, he said, with prices reaching 15,000 pounds, about $ 20,000. Today, researchers say the smuggling pipeline is well established.
At least 782 American rifles have been discovered by police since 2017, according to data obtained by The New York Times. The figure is from the National Ballistics Intelligence Service, which tracks illegal firearms in Britain, and includes rifles that came to Britain directly and indirectly from the United States.
Gun control is one of the few issues that unite a politically divided Britain. Where the United States has had horrific mass school shootings for decades, it took just one such attack in Britain to impose a ban on private ownership of small arms.
That attack – a shooting in 1996 in which 16 children and their teacher were killed at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland by a gun that then killed itself – remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history. Since then, only one other massage post has taken place in Britain.
But even with the tougher laws, handguns have still found their way into even some of the quietest corners of the country, such as the birthplace of Mr. Bains.
He grew up in a red-brick house overlooking golden fields in Rothersthorpe, a small village in the East Midlands of England, where the biggest events were often sheep escaping from the local farm. His father, Dave, says his son came in with a ‘bad public’ after his parents divorced and soon started selling cannabis.
On the night of his murder on a street corner in Upton, Northampton, Mr Bains fought for his life, according to security footage, and difficulty in disarming an attacker who pointed a Glock at him. As Mr. Bains stepped on the sidewalk, a second attacker pulled out a revolver and shot him through his lung.
The parents of Mr. Bains saw his last moments in the course of the trial of the two men convicted of his murder, Jerome Smikle and Kayongo Shuleko, both in their 20s, who were part of a drug trafficking alliance in the county lines , said the police. They were sentenced last summer to life in prison.
“I think it’s fair that they’s in jail, but Josh should not have been murdered in the first place,” said Mr Bains’ mother, Lyn Knott. “If they did not have a gun, of course, he would still be alive.”
The gun was discovered three months after the murder when a dog handler found it in a nearby field. The killers had not removed the serial numbers on the gun, and police tracked it back to Florida.
“We do not often get people shot in nice outbuildings in sleeping villages in Northampton,” said Alastair White, a senior detective at Northamptonshire Police, who led a team of about 80 on the investigation. “It was headline news.”
The presence of American guns became even clearer several months later, in July 2019, when officials with the National Crime Agency raided a rumored blue container ship as it arrived at the port of Ambarli in northern Turkey after they nearly Traveled 6,000 miles from Florida.
Inside some of the shipping containers were old American cars, and inside were hidden 57 firearms and 1,230 bullets that researchers say were intended for tires in Britain and Bulgaria. The guns were legally purchased at antique cannon festivals in Florida, the researchers said, and then flew to Turkey to reactivate illegally before being sold.
Matthew Prefect, who heads the National Crime Agency’s firearms unit, said officials were concerned enough about smuggled guns that his unit had nearly doubled its workforce in the last two years as the agency tried to suppress the firearms market to try to avoid having handguns common as knives.
“Suddenly the gun of choice became the opposite of a knife,” said Mr. Prefect, “we would be in a really difficult situation.”
The first high-profile case involving illegal U.S. firearms was in 2010, when a former Marine named Steven Greenoe was prosecuted for smuggling dozens of cannons in the north-west of England on commercial flights.
Although gun trade is almost always a secondary source of income for tires, the Greenoe case suggested it could be a very profitable trade, with guns he bought for about $ 400 selling for a ‘three times markup’, according to Gregg Taylor of the National Ballistics Intelligence Service.
One of the 70 guns that Mr. Greenoe smuggled was used in a murder in Scotland, another in a shooting sport in Manchester and a third in an attempt to shoot at Liverpool, the court heard. Ten years later, the majority of the guns he exported to Britain remain.
“Weapons that do not make it into the United States, because America is surrounded by millions, routinely have an enormous impact in the United Kingdom, due to the extremely scarce supply of small arms,” Mr Karp said of the survey on small weapons. “Thousands could have a huge impact on British crime.”
Today, Mr Bains’ father and stepmother transformed her home into a tribute to her lost 28-year-old. Early photos of Mr. Bains are placed throughout the house. His stepmother still can’t shake the memory of her seemingly healthy stepson in a coffin.
“I have never seen a healthy person in a coffin before,” Ms Bains said. “I’ve always seen sick people as old people, and that was a shock.”
