it is INCREDIBLY difficult to get hold of guns
It depends what circles people move in
I'm a bit rusty on the estimated figures, but it's somewhere in the ball park of 12 million un licensed guns in Britain
If we can't get hold of guns or smuggle in guns, there are hardly any guns.
Most recreational drugs are illegal - but, there's hardly a community in Britain where you can't get illegal hard drugs, at ever cheaper prices and higher purity.
We know from seizures that the drugs come into Britain and Ireland in consignments of up to 10 tons and more. We also know from seizures that smuggled duty free cigarettes come in by the shipping container full.
Both hard drugs and smuggled cigarettes are very high value goods. The gangs who smuggle them cannot go to the cops for security, or to report theft of their merchandise, so they have to provide their own security.
We already know from seizures of merchandise that the gangs are well able to smuggle individual consignments of several tons in weight.
There isn't much difference in the logistics between smuggling ten tons of hard drugs or a shipping container full of cigarettes, and smuggling the same weight of guns and ammunition in the same manner.
Obviously, commercially manufactured guns are going to be the easiest route:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...rgest-ever-weapons-cache-seizure-in-Kent.html
Incidentally, those are Vz 58 rifles, not AKs, but their superficial looks and performance are very similar
Organised clandestine manufacture is the next easiest;
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/08/11/mystery-9mm-machine-pistol-seized-europe/
And lastly, there are almost infinite numbers of home made bodges. I'll give a couple of examples
There is a gentleman of Turkish origin who, last I heard was serving a long prison sentence in the UK for selling blank firing replicas, that other people later, and unknown to him, put steel tubing barrels onto, and converted into machine pistols. I got to hear about him from libertarian friends who campaign against miscarriages of justice.
There was also a libertarian from near Leeds (PM me if you want his name, I'm not putting it on open forum) who by the late 1990s was sick and tired of people dismissing his argument that guns are actually fairly easy to make at home, so he designed and built a sub machinegun for himself, out of readily available steel tubing, and ordinary DIY tools. He didn't need a lathe or a milling machine.
He test fired it, wrote the project up, sent the drafts off for publication, and got a photographer to record the prototype. The photographer reported him, and he got five years in a high security prison with hardened criminals.
After he got out, he was thoroughly embittered, and published several other designs and means of improvising errrr "consumables"
The British authorities were very harsh with him after that, and were in clear contravention of at least one UN human rights declaration that Britain is a signatory to.
Nevertheless, he has shown that submachineguns and ammunition can be made at home from readily available materials and using ordinary DIY tools
actually, bugger it!
It's not like the info is difficult to find, you can buy a commercially published book on Amazon UK
Just expect your name to end up on a list if you do buy it.
In summary - even with all of those illegal routes to guns, and the unsavoury people who are involved in smuggling drugs and cigarettes
none of them has yet done a mass shooting in Britain. I hope that I'm not tempting fate by writing that.
