innocent_lex

This may have been a case of media twisting the views to put forward one particular perspective (which, y'know, wouldn't be a surprise), but...  the news is currently showing interviews with various of the people living in the village where the lunatic murdering gunman I mentioned yesterday is presumed to be hiding. The village is still in lockdown with armed police all over the place. And the general consensus according to those interviewed? It's all very exciting, and worth grinning about. A lot.

I don't get it. I'd expect them to be concerned. I'd expect them to take this seriously. I'd expect them to worry that there's a man who has apparently vowed to murder as many police officers as he can before he dies and that such a fate might befall some of the very 'exciting' police officers they're watching try to do their jobs in the face of such threats and danger. Maybe I'm just a grumpy-pants who doesn't see the big picture. Or something.

Warning: Please don't read this if you can't face senseless murder today.

I had a bad night's sleep last night but needed to get up anyway to stay in synch with the world. So up it was, and I sorted out the last of the washing, dealt with the kitchen, and then sat with some breakfast and switched on the telly, expecting not much of anything. The news was reporting an ongoing tragedy where a man, Derrick Bird, was going from village to village in Cumbria shooting people (see BBC here). There is no information yet as to the 'why' (and the why is always complex, I know, though never, never, never justified) but the 'what happened' is becoming clearer. At least 11 people were shot, at least 5 of those shot dead [ETA: latest is 12 dead, 25 injured, police still searching for further victims]. One reporter spoke of the first shooting as 'the first one we know about'. Police were issuing warnings for anyone and everyone to stay inside, to call them if they spotted the man or his car (they gave details, name, car, registration), and not to approach under any circumstances. About 4 hours after I first heard the news, the police stated that they had found another body and they think it's the gunman.

Prime Minister's Question Time today had some announcements about this, as well as about another two soldiers who've died in one of the wars we're fighting (and tell me why we're fighting those, again?), and I'm sure Cameron has some odd feelings about this being his first PMQs session. The news is rolling this over and over and over, picking up maybe one or two tiny new pieces of information for each half hour, and yet it's been hard to look away from it.

There are two other rampaging gunmen that I remember, though one I didn't have access to news at the time so didn't get a real understanding of it (Hungerford, 1987, Michael Ryan killed 16 people and wounded another 25). Dunblane (1996) I was at work for, and I know where I was, the room I was in, the client who came to get me from my office to tell me what was happening because he was a forex dealer and always had news alerts running across his screen, and that it involved Thomas Hamilton, a man who killed 16 small children and their teacher. I think it was the first time I cried at work.

Here in the UK we have strict gun control laws. The running joke is that the only people who have guns are criminals and farmers, and that's not too far from the truth. We do have police armed response units, though the vast majority of our police do not carry guns. We don't like guns and we don't want them here. Every day people in this country are killed by men (and sometimes women) with guns. Every day there are people who think they can solve problems with guns, who kill people who annoy them, who kill their 'competition', who continue gang wars, and who expend significant effort making the world a much more miserable, horrifying and frightening place. I don't understand them, and hope to never understand them. Today yet more people were killed by a man with a gun, and reports are starting to come in that those people include a woman, a married 30-ish man with small children, and another man, all apparently shot in the face; witnesses are reporting the gunman was using a sniper rifle.

A whole hell of a lot is going to be said about this over the next few days and weeks, with blame being apportioned and psychologists spouting forth and neighbours being interviewed about their shock and politicians using this as an excuse to shout at one another in the House of Commons, but it all boils down to the fact that one man decided to pick up a gun and ruin the lives of innocent people by killing them or injuring them. He was a vicious murderer who killed himself so as not to face justice.