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Yorkshire people fear flood of weapons on the streets
by peter Lazenby A SURVEY by campaigners against the arms trade shows that more than 80 per cent of people in Yorkshire are concerned about foreign weapons getting onto the streets of their communities.
The Control Arms campaign is backed by human rights group Amnesty International and Oxfam.
The survey also showed that 16 per cent of people in the region know someone who has been threatened, injured or killed by a gun in the past five years – the highest of any region in the country.
The survey found that around one in six people in Yorkshire report having seen a real gun that they understood to be illegal.
The survey comes out in the week when UK campaigners will hand in a petition to Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett calling for tighter international controls on the arms trade.
The results are part of an international survey carried out in Brazil, Guatemala, Canada, South Africa, Britain and India. Nearly two in three people (62 percent) across the six countries said they worried about becoming a victim of armed violence.
The Control Arms campaign is calling on the United Nations to introduce an international arms trade treaty to stop weapons getting into the wrong hands.
The campaign has collected photos of nearly a million people's faces as part of a "Million Faces" petition over the last three years including 150,000 from the UK and 20,000 from Yorkshire. The faces will be presented to Kofi Annan ahead of the UN Review Conference on Small Arms in New York on 26th June.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
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Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
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