Can we trust the legal owners of guns to behave safely? Philip Bowern looks at the evidence.

Gun crime is big news in Britain partly because it is so rare. Four people shot dead in a semi-detached house in Durham is, clearly, a terrible tragedy that needs a thorough investigation.

We are not, however, in the grip of an epidemic of gun-related crime, nor anywhere near it, here in the UK. Every life lost to a gun, whether deliberate or accidental, is appalling. But is it necessary, when it emerges that the weapons were legally held, to use such tragic and unusual events to demand a review of gun licensing laws?

There will always be those with a particular agenda on guns and shooting – especially the shooting of game and other live quarry. Hardly surprising then that their response to such incidents is to urge tighter restrictions on gun ownership. There are campaigners who believe the only answer to the shooting this week by Michael Atherton of his partner, her sister and his partner's niece, before he turned the gun on himself, is to ban the private ownership of all guns.

In one sense, of course, those campaigners are right. The only certain way to ensure nothing like this ever happens again with a legally held gun is to impound all privately-owned weapons and revoke all firearms licences.

That would only leave the illegal weapons out there, such as the one allegedly used in the killing in Manchester on Boxing Day of Indian student Anuj Bidve.

It is true that so long as people, with all their foibles and imperfections, are allowed to own guns, terrible tragedies will sometimes occur. But car ownership leads to accidents, some of them fatal; the fact that we can legally buy and consume alcohol has consequences for public health and public order. How far do we go to legislate away any risk in society?

That is not to say the laws on gun ownership cannot be more rigorously enforced. We will have to await the outcome of the inquiry into the Durham shootings for the full story, but it has been reported that the gunman, Mr Atherton, had come to the notice of the police three years ago because of mental health concerns and his guns were taken away. They were returned to him, however, when he lodged an appeal, presumably because officers decided, having looked at the case, that Mr Atherton posed no further significant risk either to himself or to others. Could they – should they – have acted differently? No doubt the force will have to answer in due course for that decision. Prime Minister David Cameron has moved quickly to say there are no plans to look again at the gun laws. Both the British Association for Shooting and Conservation and the Countryside Alliance, the two main lobby groups on behalf of the owners of sporting guns, issued statements deeply regretting the tragedy but urging a balanced response from the authorities in relation to gun ownership and warning against a knee-jerk reaction.

The South West has one of the highest levels of gun ownership of any region of Britain. The value of shooting to the regional economy is close to £300 million a year. There is no doubt that changes to the laws on gun ownership, particularly removing guns from the domestic environment altogether, would greatly inconvenience thousands of legal and safe gun users. Indeed it is hard to see how preventing people from continuing to hold guns at home could work, unless shooting sports were severely curtailed. Such restrictions would also have a knock-on effect for commercial shoots, both those involving live quarry and targets, as well as making life much more difficult for farmers and others who need to hold guns in order to shoot vermin. None of that would worry the anti-shooting groups who want tighter restrictions, including an outright ban.

In the United States the constitution includes the right to bear arms. In Britain we have no such right and few would suggest we need it. The guns privately held in Britain are almost exclusively for sporting purposes. That does not mean they cannot be put to other far more sinister and unacceptable uses. But then, in a less obvious manner, so can carving knives, chain saws and cricket bats.

In Durham there is a crime to be investigated and procedures in the police force's firearms unit to be reviewed.

The laws on gun ownership on which those procedures were based, however, were recently examined in the wake of the Cumbria shootings. Most people agree they are perfectly sound and robust.

When families are in mourning and emotions still raw after a sickening act of violence involving guns it might seem insensitive to be defending the ownership of weapons and the system for licensing them. Yet no more insensitive than using such a tragic incident to call for a change in the gun laws, for all the wrong reasons.