STOCKWELL, in south London, is famous for two things: Portuguese restaurants and gun crime. Last year, at the Asian-run Stockwell Food and Wine store, a five-year-old girl, Thusa Kamaleswaran, was shot and paralysed in a botched attack by the Brixton-based GAS gang (which stands for Guns and Shanks, or knives) on the Stockwell-based ABM gang (All ‘Bout Money). The shooters were three young men, who arrived on bicycles and fled the same way, leaving security camera images which shocked the nation.

Mercifully, such tragedies are becoming rarer. The number of firearms offences recorded by police is at its lowest level this millennium. Last year 39 people died from gunshots, down from 96 a decade earlier. This is not just because of better medicine; the number of people entering hospital accident and emergency departments with gunshot wounds has also dropped, from 1,370 in 2003 to 972 last year.

Violence in general is dropping. But the fall in gun crime is especially steep (see chart). The number of offences involving guns dropped by 16% last year, whereas the number of crimes involving knives (which have only been properly recorded since 2010) fell by just 5%. The biggest improvements have been in places where gun crime once seemed uncontrollable. In both Manchester, once nicknamed “Gunchester,” and Nottingham, gun crime has fallen by almost half since 2006. Organised criminals are less likely to use guns. The number of armed robberies has fallen by around 45% since 2001, and bank robberies and post office hold-ups are now almost unheard of. “Serious armed robbery has become a dinosaur crime”, says Roger Matthews, a criminologist at the University of Kent. Modern armed robbers are amateurs, he says, usually badly equipped and often on drugs. Guns are in short supply. The National Ballistics Intelligence Service, which tracks guns through bullets and shell casings, reckons that the total number of illegal firearms in the country is no more than 30,000-40,000, and the number in active use is far lower. Data from the Serious Organised Crime Agency suggests that clean guns (which have not been used) are getting more expensive, which probably means they are rarer. Even where guns are available, bullets are scarce, leading criminals to fashion their own from things like blanks and ball bearings. Firearms circulate quickly, but that increases the risk of being caught. Detectives are given a profile of where a weapon has previously been used, so criminals and gun-running networks can be pinned down. That, combined with mandatory five-year sentences for gun criminals, has convinced many that the credibility won by a firearm is not worth the risk.

Dedicated anti-guns programmes have probably helped. In Manchester, the X-Calibre project helped police identify the most important gang leaders and lock them up. In London, Operation Trident, which deals with gang and gun violence, has improved the way the police combat gun crime. Claudia Webbe, its chairwoman, says coppers have learned that London’s gangs are loose and disorganised. Rather than rushing to arrest gang members, the police get close to the girlfriends, parents and siblings of gunmen and press them for information. The result is higher detection and conviction rates, she says.

Finally, there are more law-abiding people around. Moss Side, once one of Manchester’s most notorious districts for gun crime, has become strikingly more peaceful recently. It also has many more inhabitants, lots of them immigrants. George Kelling, an American criminologist who helped devise the “broken windows” theory, reckons that hollowed-out inner cities are particularly vulnerable to violent criminals, partly because there are few people to push the police to take action. Repopulation has helped cut crime rates in New York, he says. The same may be true of Britain’s mean streets.