Global Policy Forum

The immediate attraction of the film Gangs of New York, which the bus shelter poster tells me will arrive in British cinemas on 10 January, is the return of Daniel Day-Lewis to the silver screen. For fans of My Left Foot or Last of the Mohicans, that will be enough to pull them in. But the film, set in mid-19th century New York, carries certain parallels with early 21st century Britain. Martin Scorsese's saga of gruesome violence involving immigrant gangs - "America was born on the streets" goes the promo - chronicles the period when handguns shot their way into American culture.

One academic study of emerging gun use in the 19th century looked at the case of the cities of Liverpool and New York. They were then fairly similar port cities, with large immigrant populations and broadly similar crime rates. That was until Samuel Colt invented the revolver, with a revolving cylinder that could contain five or six bullets. The mass production and sale of his weapon sent US homicide rates soaring far above Britain's, which is broadly where they've been ever since.

"Pre-gun gangs were turning into gun gangs ... this new weapon took the place of brass knuckles and bare knuckles," says Roger Lane, one of the leading US authorities on the study of violent crime. "The ingenuity of American gun-makers multiplied Colt's original invention several-fold … hideable hand-guns were soon quite widespread." That is the key to gun crime, he says: weapons that are small, hideable and easy to use. For the record, Gangs of New York opens in the winter of 1846, set in the New York slum district known as the Five Points, also featuring Leonardo di Caprio, Cameron Diaz and an Irish immigrant mob that calls itself the Dead Rabbits.

It ends in the less-infamous-than-they-ought-to-be Draft Riots of 1863, when immigrant mobs virtually held the city to ransom for a week. The 19th century Irish immigrants to America, in cities like Boston and New York, were commonly treated to the same degree of prejudice and ostracism as greeted successive waves of minorities, both black and Latino. Guns are the basis of much of Europe's fascination and loathing with the United States, from the Wild West to the mean streets.

Witness the popularity of another recent film, Bowling for Columbine, in which the guerrilla film-maker Michael Moore pursued American high-street supermarket Kmart for selling the ammunition to the killers in the Colorado school massacre. This year, we could share the terror of the sniper killings in and around Washington DC with a frisson of fear, but for the reassurance that it was only in America.

The shootings in Birmingham, however, are another jolt to that smug sense of security. The reports of teenage girls shot dead at a hair salon party shared a particular quality of American street gang killings that emerged during the crack turf wars of the 1980s. These were of teenage "gang-bangers", mostly African American, armed with a new generation of rapid-fire weapons, killing and being killed on the basis of the most trivial disputes. Being "dissed" - disrespected, by a look or a word or by a rival's graffiti or "gang sign" - would lead to a bloody response.

By the middle of 2002, mainland Europe was being shaken by what was also considered an American style of gun crimes. The Dutch right-winger Pim Fortuyn was shot dead by an apparent animal rights extremist. Scotland has seen Dunblane, but this year Germany witnessed a mass shooting in which an expelled student gunned down 13 teachers, two students and a policeman. In France, eight city councillors were shot dead by a psychiatric patient. It followed a mass killing the previous autumn in Zug, Switzerland.

There are two styles of gun killings where America, for Europe, has led the way: the spree killing and the street crime. After US school shootings hit their horrific climax with Columbine, scholars suggested that the saturation of guns in American society was such that guns were brimming over, so to speak, from the adult population to the children. In Britain's case, the plethora of the guns now on the streets is a different kind of overspill. Yardie gangsters may have their roots in Jamaica, but they are likely to carry weapons made in the former Soviet bloc.

The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of Soviet bloc countries saw their weaponry pour on to private markets. Former Soviet countries - the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria - held on to their still-profitable gun industries as their economies went into freefall. So new weapons, not just ex-military armaments, are making their way to Britain. The guns move via western Europe. You can't walk into shops in France or any western European country and buy, easily, or legally, a handgun. But from the illegal markets, particularly in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, gun-runners can bring guns into Britain, says Rebecca Peters, of the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms.

US gun advocates will argue, of course, that gun violence in Britain demonstrates that gun control is a failure. The fact remains that Europe's gun crime rates are still far below those in the US. What Europe's newly open borders underline, says Ms Peters, is the need for international co-operation. "Britain, for example, has banned handguns but that policy is undermined by the continuing sale of handguns," she said. Again, there is an American parallel. New York, outsiders may forget, bans the sale of handguns; so does Washington DC. They are imported from states, typically in the south and west, where free firearm ownership so mightily exercises its grip on the American soul.

The United Nations has begun to take an interest; it held its first conference on trafficking in guns in 2001, and a follow-up conference is set for July of this year. In this case, one hopes, a UN conference may prove more than a forum for mouthing happy platitudes and setting unachievable goals.

Anti-gun organisations are trying to raise the level of concern over gun production in accession negotiations as the Eastern bloc countries flock to join the EU. Should we now emulate another American example and arm our police? Absolutely not; the goal should be to disarm the criminals, not arm the police.

"It's a shame that British police are carrying guns so much more," says Ms Peters. In the US, the gun culture has seen a spiralling arms race of its own; US police now carry not the trusty .38s of detective novel lore but the rapid-fire, large magazine .9mms. In Los Angeles, the police are equipped with M-16s. US gun violence has turned sharply downwards in recent years; in a decade, New York's homicide rate has fallen to a quarter of its previous level. But the city said goodbye to 2002 with a string of gruesome shootings.

It included the deaths of two young men, shot to death by police marksmen. "When police begin to carry guns, they also begin to be much more ready to use the guns; as police carry guns, criminals have more motivation to carry them," says Ms Peters. Shootings of civilians and unarmed criminals only rises.