Matthew's Journal

We don't have many guns in the UK; after Dunblane we decided that enough was enough, and by 1997 private ownership of handguns (as opposed to sporting rifles and shotguns) was largely illegal. Forensics mean the police are now able to identify handguns reasonably well from the discarded cartridges, and track their use over time. From this, a particular gun, "gun number 6" has been identified as the deadliest illegal gun in the UK - used in 11 shootings and 3 murders.

Gun No 6 (iPlayer, until the end of the year) is the story of that gun. Or rather, it is a docu-drama of what we know of the gun - none of the shooters of it (even those convicted of its use) will talk about it and neither will most of the victims themselves. We hear from the families of the dead, and we hear from other men with convictions for gun-related violence. And those ex-offenders reconstruct the 11 shootings.

It's a tricky thing to try and pull off (and I suspect there will be plenty of people who think they failed); I was struck by how easily the ex-offenders could imagine the scenarios and talk about the likely motivations for the attacks. The film-maker asked them quite probing questions about their own interactions with gun crime, and how handling a gun made them feel; and the answers largely felt honest. These were men who were glad to have made it out alive, but also pretty unsentimental about why they'd done the things they'd done.

Early on, the mother of someone murdered during an armed robbery asks "why would it be normal for someone to pick up a gun?" I don't think this film could answer that question, but it did show us a bit about both those people for whom picking up a gun was once part of life; and the devastating consequences of a single 9mm pistol.