We often hear the mantra about reduction in police officers on the streets... while admittedly the presence of bobbies on the beat does serve the purpose of reassuring the public, I believe that crime rates are actually linked more closely to conviction rates, or in other words to the probability of getting caught and convicted.
Criminals take advantage of the fact that the police do not have sufficient resources to properly investigate petty crime such as theft from vehicle, burglaries, street mugging, low-level drug dealing, and recently also fraud and cyber crime (only fraud complaints where £100,000 or over were taken actually get investigated by police, lower amounts are not even flagged-up by ActionFraud for investigation).
This means that criminals know which crimes they can commit with near-impunity.
The way to prevent crimes involving firearms (real or imitation) is to my mind more detection and higher conviction rates.
If criminals knew that the chances of actually being caught when committing a violence offence involving a firearm are very high, most would think twice.
This is not the same as thougher punishments - because if criminals don't believe they'll actually get caught, the punishment is no deterrent.
But in order to achieve this, police need to prioritise the allocation of their CID resources (and not just officers on the beat).
They need to have more detectives... and ask themselves if the resource-intensive and fruitless investigations into historic allegations against Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan, Harvey Proctor, Sir Cliff Richard, Edward Heath and others were best use of the detectives available to them.