In American cities, the idea of kids finding a gun in bushes or a drainage ditch isn’t all that unusual. Now, many of these cities have gun control laws in place, but criminals don’t obey laws.

“This doesn’t happen in the UK,” someone might counter, and for pretty good reason. They’ve never heard of such a thing in England, Ireland, or Scotland.

Well, they have now.

Two young children found three ‘viable’ guns which had been hidden in bushes in Heywood it has been confirmed. The shocking discovery was made by the youngsters, aged seven and 10, in the Darnhill area of the town at around 6:30pm yesterday evening (Monday).

The weapons, as well as ammunition, were found on land on land off Argyle Street Greater Manchester Police (GMP) which is close to a local primary school.

The firearms have been examined and deemed to be ‘viable’ GMP said. An investigation to try and trace their owner is now underway. No arrests have yet been made.

However, police chiefs have hit out at whoever ‘was reckless enough to try and hide them where they could be found by children.’ A cordon was in place at the scene on Monday with forensic officers in white suits seen combing the area for clues. Searches have also been carried out in the surrounding area with extra officers out on patrol to help reassure locals

Good luck.

Now, we’re not really sure what a “viable” gun actually is other than, well, a functional firearm. I suppose this is to differentiate it from a replica firearm which is legal throughout Europe, but often get converted to a working gun.

Law enforcement will likely make a lot of noise, but it’s unless there’s a witness to the guns being hidden, they’re not likely to catch the guilty party.

After all, it’s not like there’s a registry for illegal guns.

Yet for all of the UK’s gun control laws, if they work as advertised, how could this possibly have happened? We don’t know exactly what the guns were, of course, so that information might answer some of our questions, but the big one is just how such an irresponsible party could have gotten a gun in the first place if gun control works as advertised.

“But their gun homicide rate is so much lower than ours,” someone might offer as a counter.

However, they’d also need to be aware that our knife homicide rate is higher than their total homicide rate. So yeah, their gun control policies have little to do with the difference in gun homicides. In fact, they could mirror the gun laws of one of our more pro-gun states and they’d still have a lower homicide rate than we do.

It’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

Police are going to look for this guy, but anti-gunners here in the state will be looking for a place to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this simply didn’t happen. That way they won’t have to explain yet more gun control failures.