Police stats inflate the number of guns actually stolen in Blighty

Repeat after me. A moderator is not a firearm

The key point here is that ACPO is saying "firearms" are being lost and stolen when what they really mean is "objects held on a firearm certificate and licensed in the same way as a firearm".

This misleads the public into believing that the problem is greater than it really is, even though ACPO itself admits that by its own inflated figures just 0.18 per cent of "licensed firearms" were lost or stolen between 2009 and 2013.

Moderator: It's the fat can on the end of the rifle. It reduces the sound of a shot being fired, but it doesn't silence it altogether

Of course, value judgments have to be made here. When judging what to include as a "firearm" for the purposes of this analysis we did exclude spare barrels and receivers; unless you have access to a machine shop and the necessary skills and knowledge to fabricate a bolt and receiver to go with it, the greatest harm you could do with a chambered barrel is to whack someone over the head with it. Viewed objectively, a barrel on its own is less likely to pose a threat to public safety than a fully functioning firearm going AWOL.

While El Reg does not have access to fully detailed Home Office data for more recent years than 2011, there is no obvious reason why similar "loss inflation" would not have taken place with the latest figures. The similarity between overall thefts and losses from the ACPO figures and the Home Office figures, before the Home Office data is controlled to remove non-firearm objects, suggests that ACPO are including non-lethal items in their numbers and thus making a very small problem seem bigger than it is.

So what happened here?

Is this a cockup or a conspiracy? We favour the former explanation; we think someone at ACPO probably went onto NFLMS, dumped out all the data for items tagged "lost" or "stolen" for the five-year period the press officers asked for, totted up the numbers and left it at that.

However, while the motive may have been innocent, the effect certainly isn't. Why didn't someone who understood the data double-check it to ensure it was relevant to the point being made before releasing it? It's no good telling the public "3,000 guns were lost or stolen over the last five years" when the people you're trying to reach - licensed gun owners - are blowing raspberries at you because they know your figures are flawed.

If raw data dumps are now being quoted as authoritative statistics compiled by subject matter experts, someone needs to step up immediately and say "sorry, we got this one wrong". ®

Bootnotes

Your correspondent firmly believes that it is very much in the public interest for items that can be used to construct a firearm, such as chambered barrels and complete receivers, to be licensed and held on firearm certificates. Nobody sane wants illicit firearms put together outside of legal oversight.

However, that does not excuse senior police constables from issuing misleading statistics as part of a crusade against lawful firearms owners, who are thoroughly background-checked and constantly monitored to ensure their fitness and suitability to have access to firearms.

* Interested parties can download the Home Office dataset here. (ZIP file containing an XLS spreadsheet, 127.5KB). Note that the data was not formatted by El Reg. Our analysis of this data was based on a line-by-line count of each firearm and shotgun lost or stolen, using our knowledge of firearms law and the licensing system to discount non-firearm objects.

** Sound moderators do not have a "calibre" as such but are entered onto firearm certificates with a calibre so they can be readily associated with a particular rifle. This system breaks down as soon as one acquires more than one rifle in the same calibre as the moderator.

Air rifle moderators - which work in the same way as live firearm moderators, and in the case of .22" moderators are often identical - are not licensed.