Day: June 4, 2010

Already, following the Derrick Bird shooting spree in Cumbria, there have been calls for toughening of the gun laws in this country. This is the typical knee jerk reaction that we saw after Hungerford and Dunblane.

I ask you how would that help ? How would tougher laws have helped Derrick Birds victims ?  Derrick Bird had, apparently,  held a gun license for over 20 years with no signs that he was anything other than a law-abiding citizen. No indications that he was a risk.

There have been mass killings or attacks in the past where either guns or knives have been used and we have had legislation for years.

The UK knife legislation makes it illegal to carry certain types of knife or knives with blades over a certain size. That doesn’t stop the yobs from wandering our streets carrying everything from flick knives thru hunting knives to samurai swords. It didn’t stop a machete wielding individual from attacking children in a Wolverhampton school.

There will always be bad people out there who will circumvent all the legal controls to get what they want. And then there are the folks who just explode into bad actions as a result of drugs, alcohol, mental or anger issues.

You cannot legislate for spontaneous events which, so far, the events in Cumbria appear to have been.

Ever since the awful shootings that took place in Cumbria this week there have been dissenting voices who have some how made this out to be the fault of the police. i.e. Where were the police ?, Why didn’t the police do something ? and so on. In my opinion there is no way that the police could have stopped this from happening.

Derrick Bird was not walking around with a label stating “I am a homicidal maniac”. Even after he had shot his first victim, although the police would have been called, nobody knew he was just starting out on a killing spree. I’m sure that the police may have began to wonder, when the 2nd call was received, but they still wouldn’t have known how far this was going to go.

Some bright sparks have asked why the police didn’t implement road blocks to prevent Bird from getting to his later victims. How would they do that in an area criss crossed with hundreds of country lanes ? It is only with the power of hindsight and the news media produced maps that one can see the direction Bird was travelling.  Despite what we are shown on programs such as “24” the police can’t just call for satellites to be repositioned so that the perp can be intercepted. Lets recognise also that they are human beings just like you and me. They may have special training but that doesn’t turn them into super beings. We are light years away from having a force comprised of “robocops”. At the time all the police could do was take in the reports of where he had been. Also, we now know that there are some 30 crime scenes. How would any police force have coped with that many incidents even spread as they were over three hours ?

I for one am sick to death of people giving the police a hard time. Its time they were given the recognition they deserve.