A report examining crime in Britain since “restrictive firearm laws virtually banned handguns” in 1997 shows that crime stats have been “massaged” to convince British subjects the gun ban worked, when in fact it may have backfired.

Authored by Dr. Paul Gallant, Dr. Joanne D. Eisen, Alan J. Chwick, and Sherry Gallant, and published at AmmoLand, the report shows that as recently as 2008 “one in three [Brits] had been a victim of crime, or knew someone who had been.” Also in 2008, “nearly half [of survey respondents] knew of someone in their community who had been a victim in the last year.”

How is such crime possible if banning guns produced the utopia CNN’s Piers Morgan repeatedly describes?

The report claims the numbers Morgan and others quote are drawn from figures that have been distorted to one extent or another in order to make the gun ban look successful.

The report shows that “the Brits…freely admit to massaging crime figures” and “are vigorously and openly beating their statistics to a bloody pulp, as they have created a stunningly large bureaucracy to deal with crime figures.”

This bureaucracy decides “how…crime will ultimately be reported.” This includes deciding what crimes will or will not be reported as well. They do this through the use of “targets” which guide police in reducing the number of crimes reported.

The Independent reported on the use of “targets” in January, explaining that these represent certain bureaucratically-designated thresholds that a given crime has to meet to even be labeled as “crime” in the first place.

For instance, “just about every single reported theft of a mobile phone is recorded as lost property,” and very few attempted burglaries are recorded as “attempted burglaries because they all get recorded as criminal damage.” In both instances the reason is the same–“lost property” does not drive up crime stats and “criminal damage” is less severe that “attempted burglary.”

So what are the exact crime numbers in Britain? The honest answer is that no one knows because the statistics have been so manipulated, but the evidence suggests such manipulation has resulted in a crime rate that should be higher than gun control proponents have claimed.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.