Police stand guard outside the library in Birstall, England, where MP Jo Cox was killed Thursday. (Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse)
Four days after the horrific mass shooting in Orlando sparked a fresh 
debate about gun control in the United States, a fatal attack on a 
politician in Britain is bringing attention to that country's gun
 control policies.
Jo Cox, a member of the British Parliament for the center-left Labour 
Party, was shot and stabbed while meeting with constituents near
 the northern city of Leeds on Thursday. According to police, 
the 41-year-old has died of her injuries.
Any physical attack on a British politician would be extremely 
unusual, but that the attack on Cox involved a firearm may be
 even more surprising within Britain. The United Kingdom has 
strict gun laws that make getting a firearm quite difficult. Gun
 crime is relatively low in the country.
[British member of Parliament dies following shooting]
"In terms of the types of gun that can be legally owned, 
background checks and the penalties for illegal possession 
and use, we are one of the strictest in Europe," Helen Poole, 
a researcher with the University of Coventry who recently 
studied firearms across the European Union, said in an e-mail.
The British government pursued legislative bans on assault
 rifles and handguns and dramatically tightened background
 checks for other types of firearms after a horrific mass shooting
 at a school that killed 15 children and their teacher in 1996. 
As The Washington Post reported in 2013 a total of 200,000
 guns and 700 tons of ammunition were taken off British streets
 in the 17 years since the attack. Military-style weapons and most 
handguns were banned, including Olympics-style starting pistols.
According to the most recent statistics, there were 1,338,399 
shotguns licensed in England and Wales last year, and more than
 500,000 firearms of other types also licensed. There were about
 582,494 licensed shotgun owners and 153,603 licensed for other
 firearms, almost all of whom lived in rural areas and who used
 their guns for sport or to protect their farmland.
That means that last year there were around 1,863,524 legally
held guns in England and Wales, two nations which have a total
 population of over 58 million. To put it another way, this means
 that around 3,200 shotguns and other firearms for every 100,000 
people in Britain. Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that there
 are believed to be about 357 million guns in the United States for
 317 million people.
Legally owned guns are just one aspect of gun ownership, of 
course. France has strict gun laws that are comparable to Britain's, 
but authorities have estimated that there may be 30,000 illegally 
obtained in the country. Around 4,000 were thought to be "war 
weapons," including Uzis and the Kalashnikov AK-variant rifles. 
These are the sorts of weapons that were used in a series of terror 
attacks in Paris last year that killed scores of people.
IBM POWER SYSTEMSWhy data is "the new natural resource"
We can use it to make faster, smarter decisions.
Britain has not yet suffered a shooting attack on the similar scale
 to the one in France. Perhaps part of this may come down to
 geography, rather than policy. Because the island country is not 
part of the Europe's Schengen Area, which has no border control,
 importing a bulky AK-47 without arising official suspicion is a
 difficult task. In France, driving halfway across the continent with
 such a gun in the trunk of your car is a real possibility.
Without the widespread availability of such guns, anyone seeking
 a firearm for criminal purposes in Britain will need to get creative. 
In 2014, the Birmingham Mail reported that criminals in the city 
had been forced to use "plundered war trophies and collectible 
weapons, sometimes more than 100 years old." In fact, during the 
2011 riots in the city, experts discovered that a late 19th-century St.
 Etienne revolver had been fired. In other instances, flare guns and 
replica weapons had been retrofitted in an attempt to make them
 deadlier.
More sophisticated guns are often in drastically short supply. 
Handguns have been sold for more than 10 times the price at which 
they could be purchased in the United States. This sometimes leads
 to elaborate arrangements between gun dealers and their customers. 
The Economist has reported that two rival gangs in Birmingham 
were later found to have used the same gun to shoot each other's 
members and affiliates. Each had rented the gun from a third party 
at separate times.
Matt Lewis, the director of Arquebus Solutions, a company that 
helps governments track illegal firearms, says Britain is seen as
 a "world leader" in understanding the circulation of illicit firearms.
 "The UK has arguably the best approach the management of illicit 
firearms in the E.U., if not across the globe," Lewis says.
Yet gun violence has not been eradicated in Britain. Last year, officials
 recorded a rise in both homicides and gun-related crime in the country.
 Numbers compiled by GunPolicy.org, a global project of the Sydney
 School of Public Health, found that 146 people died because of gun 
violence across Britain in 2012, the most recent year for which the 
group has numbers. There have also been a small number of mass
 shootings since stricter gun control legislation was put in place:
 In 2010, a man shot 12 people and injured 11 more before killing
 himself in a shooting rampage in Cumbria, England.
The shooter in that instance, Derrick Bird, used a double-barrel 
shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle. He was a licensed firearms holder. 
According to witnesses, the gun used to shoot Cox on Thursday
 appeared to be either antique or modified.
"It looked like a gun from, I don't know, the First World War
 or a makeshift, handmade gun," eyewitness Hichem Ben
 Abdallah 
told Sky News. "It's not sort of like the kind of gun you 
see normally."