Leading article: Quick fixes are no cure for chronic problems

The Prime Minister joined the national panic about gun violence yesterday, with an all too typical promise to be even tougher on this especially pernicious type of crime. Among the measures Tony Blair proposed were extending mandatory five-year prison sentences for gun-possession to 17-year-olds and making gang membership a specific offence that could also be considered an aggravating factor when someone was sentenced for another crime. What was all that about overcrowding in our prisons and the Home Office warning judges to watch their sentencing?

The contradictions, though, run deeper than this. A closer look at the Prime Minister's proposals for tackling gun violence suggests a measure of confusion in government about the current state of the law - either that, or extreme cynicism about the distinction between presentation and substance. The most specific recommendation Mr Blair made in his interview on BBC 1's Sunday AM programme was for a lowering of the age, from 21 to 17, at which a mandatory five-year prison sentence would apply for carrying a gun.

Related articles

• Blair accused of 'knee-jerk' response to gun deaths
• Johann Hari: Young people are the victims of the war on drugs
• Search the news archive for more stories

In fact, a three-year old law, passed by this very government, provides for just such a sentence to apply to all over-18s, and for mandatory three-year prison sentences for younger offenders. So what Mr Blair was proposing, amid great fanfare and talk of toughness, boils down to something much more modest: an extra two years in prison for 17-year olds found guilty of possessing an illegal fire-arm. This would not, we suspect, be an enormous deterrent.

And if a part of the problem - as some have suggested - is that older offenders are using juveniles to carry guns for them so as to avoid these mandatory sentences, what difference is the inclusion of 17-year-olds in the higher sentencing bracket likely to make? Short-termist and knee-jerk are the words that come to mind in characterising Mr Blair's favoured remedies.

The same words could well apply to the reaction of the Metropolitan Police, which mounted Operation Neon to put "more" armed officers on the streets of the worst-affected areas of south London. While the patrols began almost immediately, amid the high publicity generated by a crisis, we would be curious to know what "more" armed officers means, and how many officers - armed or unarmed - regularly patrolled the streets before. The impression given by residents is that, before this month's spate of killings, uniformed officers were thin to non-existent on the ground.

What most concerns us, though, is that we are seeing yet again the jumble of cause, effect and showy government response that has become so familiar - and so dispiriting. Anyone would think that Britain was experiencing a sudden epidemic of gun violence; in fact, gun crime has been falling. Anyone would think longer prison sentences for ever younger offenders had not been tried. In fact, Britain has proportionally more young people in prison than almost any other country in Europe. It also has one of the highest incidences of illegal drug addiction and family breakdown.

Mr Blair was largely right when he said that gun violence was "a specific problem within a specific criminal culture" - and, he might have added, confined mostly to specific urban areas. But it also reflects problems that require more than the quick fix of longer sentences and one-off saturation policing. It requires a co-ordinated approach to tackling deprivation, poor educational and recreational opportunities and local economies fuelled by the drug trade. Unfortunately, such measures are necessarily gradual, and they attract far fewer headlines than proposals for new crimes, longer sentences, and catchily named mobilisations of police.