The city with 190 gun-toting gangs: How the Skorpion machine gun became the weapon of choice in Liverpool - where women and children have become collateral damage in spiralling tit for tat drug war

The Skorpion submachine gun, lightweight and easily concealable, can fire 16 bullets a second and 900 in a minute. Indiscriminate, uncontrolled carnage is unleashed, in other words, when the trigger is held down; only a sociopath would discharge such a weapon outside a battlefield.

But, according to police, it is the new gun of choice for organised crime groups in Liverpool.

The latest sickening proof is here in the Old Swan district in Wavertree, a few miles south-east of the city centre, which is considered a decent place to live.

Yet shortly after 12.