The police confiscated weapons like knives, firearms and strong fireworks from teenagers and children a record 2,300 times in 2025, the national police force has said. This is up from around 1,800 three years earlier, an almost 28% rise.
Knives accounted for 947 of last year’s seizures, up from 742 in 2022, while firearms and firearm parts rose from 289 to 442. Illegal fireworks seizures jumped from 3,341 to 5,343.
The police said previous tallies had undercounted seizures, meaning real totals for earlier years were also higher than reported.
Senior police officer Martin Sitalsing called the trend worrying. Officers were finding that young people now considered carrying a weapon normal, he said. “But it is not normal.”
Sitalsing blamed social-media threats, online glorification of violence and the ease of buying weapons online. He also warned about the rapid spread of “violence to order”, in which criminal networks recruit minors via social media to commit serious offences for small sums of money.
The figures follow Europol’s warning last month about gangs hiring teenagers across Europe for “violence as a service” and Tuesday’s annual report from the public prosecution department (OM), which showed a 20% rise since 2023 in teenagers suspected of serious crimes.
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