Re: The wife's primary pistol of choice ...
Just go Yahoogle for Shottingham", Nottingham's nickname. The stat was from counting gun-crime incidents per thousand population in inner cities, and the worrying bit was a whole host of Western cities (London, Chicago and Detroit were also on the list) came out as more dangerous than Kabul or Baghdad! Just how much of a failure Tony Blair's knee-jerk banning of all handgun ownership was is a matter of record:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6438601/Gun-crime-doubles-in-a-decade.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lil51T7UIrc
Taking handguns away from law-abiding owners was simply windrow-dressing to garner votes and make it look like New Labour was "tough on gun-crime", when the reality was hitting out at the small number of legal gun-owners cost little to do (most of us voted Tory) but had zero impact on actual gun-crime. Legally-owned and licensed handguns were used in a tiny percentage of crimes prior to the ban, and their banning was never going to make a difference to the massive number of illegal weapons wielded by people that had no intention of following laws.
An exact analogy would be if I told you that you couldn't have a car anymore, that I was banning all privately-owned cars, simply because some criminal had brought one over from France and run someone over. Oh, but that ban would affect the majority of voters.....