HOW hard are Glasgow's crime gangs?

For generations some in Scotland's biggest city have had a kind of perverse pride in its hardman reputation.

This, after all, is a community that tabloids have long - wrongly - branded as "Europe's murder capital".

And, with a multi-million-pound market for drugs and prostitution alone, it certainly has a vibrant network of organised criminals.

The most recent routine snapshot by Police Scotland found Glasgow had 48 active underworld groups employing around 800 people.

But how violent are they, by international gangland standards? Not very. And how many people do they kill? Not many.

The killing of Kevin "Gerbil" Carroll had all the hallmarks of a criminal hit. His death was shocking, but it was shocking because it was an unusual event, not a common one.

There are no official statistics for the number of gangland killings in Scotland.

But there are robust numbers that strongly suggest the figures are low.

The Scottish Government, until last year, counted contract killings, which, of course, are not necessarily Mob-related. There were four in the decade from 2003-04 to 2012-13.

The government also counts fatal shootings, including homicides.

Carroll was one of just two homicide victims who died as a result of gunshot wounds in 2009-10.

Not all gangland killings, of course, are shootings. And not all shooting homicides are gangland-related.

But the figure - on a continent where gangsters frequently turn to firearms - is telling. It is also typical. There have been just two firearm homicides in Scotland in four of the last 10 years and just one in another. The average number over the last decade is 4.2 a year, and that is skewed by the fact that there were eight in 2004-05, 2005-06 and 2006-07.

Homicides are probably the easiest crime statistic to analyse - bodies are easy to count. And Scotland's bodycount, overall, has more than halved in the last decade.

International comparisons are hard to draw, even on something as straightforward as homicide. But Glasgow's French twin city, Marseille, might be one possible benchmark. Like Glasgow, it has a reputation for drugs and violence. Marseille, just a little bigger than Scotland's largest city, suffered 24 firearms homicides in 2012, most gangster-related.

Even England and Wales, which has the same gun laws as Scotland, regularly produces more firearms homicides. There were 41 shooting homicides in England and Wales in 2009-10, the year Carroll was killed. That, per capita, is twice as high as Scotland.

Police insiders stress that gangs in Glasgow and elsewhere do need a regular supply of muscle, of violent men like Carroll. But the success of Scottish gangsters is often in avoiding violence, rather than using it.