What someone like Piers Morgan will not bother telling you also is that following the 1997 pistol ban in the U.K. (in the wake of Thomas Hamilton’s bloody rampage in Dunblane), people simply made handguns in tire shops and elsewhere and bought them from the Eastern Europe illegal gun trade(certainly did not need expensive Olympic target shooting pistols or rare collection pieces).
Any reasonably good machinist, working with templates and design specs, could construct a fairly good facsimile of a simple pistol, capable of firing a projectile lethal at fairly short range, and with practice, gain enough skills to build some pretty precision and accurate sidearms.
But even crude weapons may be fashioned from common materials and with only a fair degree of being handy with metalworking and joining of parts. May not have a very long lifetime, but these “Saturday Night specials” could find their way into hands of “self-defense”.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2012/7/24/the-liberator-pistol/
The genie is kind of out of the bottle on containing small arms altogether.
That's true. When getting caught with an old revolver carried as big a penalty as other firearms that had been illegal for far longer, it became an "in for a penny, in for a pound" scenario for criminals. Nasty little pieces of hardware like the Czech Škorpion machine pistol started turning up in reports by regional police departments to Scotland Yard.