A MAJOR police operation was launched after a man was seen walking around Barnoldswick with a gun.

But the weapon turned out to be a ball-bearing gun and now police have urged people not to buy the toys.

A 29-year-old man was arrested in connection with the incident in the Butts area and is being questioned.

Police received a call about a man in the town with a gun and the caller said he believed he was a serious threat.

The gun was later discovered to be one that fires ball-bearings but because of the risk of a potentially dangerous situation a fire arms operation involving two armed response units, police dogs, a local supervision sergeant and a number of other patrols, was put in to place.

A house in the Craven Street area was cordoned off before police made a forced entry and found an imitation weapon. Inspector Martin Holleran, geographic inspector for Colne and West Craven, said the incident on Wednesday, at 5.10pm was a costly and time consuming operation which could have been avoided.

He said: "This issue has been in the news recently linked to the conference in Blackpool because you can buy these guns anywhere in Blackpool and people are walking round waving them about.

"There have been calls for these imitation fire arms to visibly show they are imitation because in this instance we have swung in to a large scale operation and a large number of officers were tied up all evening for the sake of what became less serious.

"Although this was an adult this time, I would ask parents to consider very carefully before allowing their children to go out and purchase ball bearing guns because if they get in to the wrong hands and people start walking round openly waving them at people it could easily lead to armed response coming in.

"I am very concerned about this. If we get a unit over from Preston about 30 miles away it means there's no armed response team there to deal with an armed robbery."

Armed response officers launched a campaign last year to raise awareness about air rifles and ball bearing guns and have visited schools across the Pennine Division.

Sergeant Craig Illingworth, operations sergeant for firearms and dogs, said: "We have been going out to schools to give talks to people in their teenage years to educate them about the dangers and we have been doing this on quite a regular basis..

"I think we have visited around 4,000 pupils so far which is a lot of classes and presentations. We are taking an active approach to raising awareness about these kind of weapons."