An Infernal Machine.

On August 16th, Sir John Stevens, commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, proudly displayed for reporters "a new piece of fire-power in their crime busting arsenal -- a machine that destroys guns," reported The Scotsman. The device in question is a machine "designed to cut and chop guns into tiny unusable pieces."

"The equipment, the first of its type in the world, is used by several other forces as well as the Met and allows weapons to be destroyed on site, avoiding the potentially dangerous process of transporting them to a specialist location," continued the report. Stevens gleefully fed several confiscated weapons into the machine, including Uzi and Lancaster submachine guns and a Model 15 Magnum handgun.

Despite the fact that the murder rate in London has remained relatively stable over the past few years, "there has been an increase of more than 100 percent in the number of murders involving firearms this year," and an 11 percent increase in overall gun crime this year alone, noted The Scotsman. Predictably enough, this dramatic increase in gun-related crime followed a draconian 1997 law that effectively banned civilian possession of handguns.