A bloody feud between two heavily-armed gangs has brought terror to the streets of inner-city Birmingham.

Yesterday's [url=news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=366021]murder of two teenage girls at a party[/url] in the Aston area of the city was close to the scenes of other gang shootings and was immediately linked to the tit-for-tat feud by many locals.

The war between the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys, who emulate Jamaican Yardie gangsters in their fight for control of Birmingham's street drug trade, has been tormenting the Midlands city for more than six years. The gangs have been held responsible for gangland-style executions, armed robberies and dozens of shootings. One killing involving the gangs in 2000 was compared in court to "a gunfight at the OK Corral".

They have been targeted by West Midland Police's specialist Operation Ventara team, which investigates black-on-black gun crime and is modelled on Scotland Yard's Operation Trident.

The gangs take their names from their original meeting places – one a café in Johnson Street and the other a fast-food outlet in the Lozells district of the city. [red]Police hoped they had ended the violence in 1997 when several leaders of the Johnson Crew were convicted of serious offences, including murder and armed robbery.[/red]

The release from prison of some gang members has coincided with a resurgence of feuding in Britain's underworld, with access to firearms in the inner cities at an unprecedented level. [red]Estimates of the numbers of guns in circulation, given to a Home Office committee in 1996, ranged from 200,000 to four million.

[size=3]But the total is increasing all the time.[/size=3][/red] The National Criminal Intelligence Service believes some guns are available for hire and others used in one crime are sold on to other criminals rather than flung away. The gun's rise as a status symbol has seen them used increasingly by black gangsters in cities including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds to settle inter-gang disputes, even over relatively minor drug debts.

Where once only senior members of Turkish gangs had guns, they are increasingly widespread and used against rivals, police and Customs to try to avoid the long jail terms for heroin smuggling. [red]Semi- automatic and automatic guns are also [size=3]becoming more common.[/size=3][/red] "There is no street cred in a sawn-off shotgun for the majority of today's armed criminals," said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens.

[red]Gun crime has increased sharply in recent years[/red], especially in cities and not just within and between organised gangs, although contract killings and violent kidnappings have risen sharply.

Last month, Scotland Yard reported seeing considerably more guns used in robberies: 116 in November, compared with 83 in April, and said it was training new armed teams to meet the threat. [red]The Home Office will publish new figures this month showing a record number of crimes involving guns.[/red]

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When I was a child(too many years ago to mention in public!) Great Britain used to pride itself on the fact that most policemen never carried guns. It appears that now ONLY the ordinary citizen is unarmed.

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For the most part, English cops still don't carry guns...

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For the most part, English cops still don't carry guns...

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For the most part, English cops still don't carry guns...

Criminologist and former West Midlands police officer Doug Sharp said: "We're going to see more shooting incidents and they will be a regular feature of our news for some time.

"It's relatively straightforward to get firearms in this country - there has been an increase in firearms coming into the country since the end of the Balkan conflicts.

"After all if you can smuggle people into the country you can smuggle firearms."

At the City Hospital in Birmingham, the number of people being treated for shootings has trebled in four years.