According to the media, something very American has happened in Britain this week -- a shooting spree, as American as streaky bacon, apple pie, and Jell-o. In these times of extreme grief, outrage, fear and uncomprehension, the media draws on what is familiar: gun violence = USA, Hungerford, Dunblane, and a call for tighter gun laws. The only problem is, in this case, the old formula doesn't quite compute. America is the gun crime capital of the world because our society is awash with easy-to-obtain firearms, many of them specifically made to mow down large numbers of people in small amounts of time. Often, when someone goes postal (a term we invented, thank you very much), our lax gun control laws are to blame because it turns out that he shouldn't have been carrying a gun in the first place and certainly shouldn't have been carrying the types of hand guns and semi-automatics that he used in his crime.The Cumbria massacre was carried out by a middle-aged man with no history of mental problems or criminality using a shotgun and a .22 calibre rifle. See the difference?
Despite being from the land of of the quick and the dead, I don't have a strong stance on guns. I have shot them, enjoyed doing so, but would not shed a tear of they were all made illegal tomorrow. I would be happy to see more gun control in my own country, but my deepest fear regarding guns -- something that has been with me since seeing 'Bowling For Columbine' -- is that guns are not the problem. In that movie, the director Michael Moore points out that, per capita, Canadians own as many guns as American, yet they aren't shooting each other apart a couple times a year. On the other extreme, Britain has some of the tightest gun control laws in the world, but they weren't able to stop Cumbria. I have always respected Britain's ability and wilingness to learn from its mistakes and evolve as a society. However, I fear that the Cumbria shootings prove that there are some bogeymen that cannot be banished by public outrage and swift legislation alone. Such dark thoughts bring a whole new meaning to the term "Broken Britain".
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As Ted rightly points out, underneath the shock, horror and sympathy, the most pressing - and uncomfortable - question nagging away at the British consciousness right now is 'why?'. Even before Bird had fired his final, dreadful shot, the race was on to find a motive - and as the grim realisation that we may never find one dawns on the nation, there is a sense of unease which is impossible to shake. This isn't supposed to happen here: even now, despite the painful events of last week, the British perspective is that this is an American problem.
The reason for this collective national amnesia is that the alternative is too awful to consider - the only way we can sleep peacefully in our beds is to treat this as an anomaly. Without wishing to rationalise the clearly insane, the most notorious American shootings tend to be based on some sort of twisted logic, from the revenge-seeking outcasts of Columbine to the publicity-grabbing farewell videos of Virginia Tech. There is even some comfort to be found in the pantomime posing and videogame weaponry of US atrocities, which at least give society a recognisable framework for their anger - there is no shred of reassurance to be found in an apparently well-liked man waging his own lonely war across one of Britain's most scenic counties. Dwell on this too long, and suddenly every familar face from the pub is a potential killer. Far easier to forget until the next one comes along.
It is interesting to note how Whitehaven fits into the overall debate on guns in the US and the UK. When an evidently troubled individual's uncontrolled urges combine with a readily availabile arsenal of gruesome weaponry to deadly effect - as is often the case in US tragedies - we in the UK are quick to preach that this is an inevitable result of your lenient gun laws. The counter from the pro-arms lobby, however, is that it isn't the guns themselves that actually commit the crime - an argument all-the-more compelling, and unsettling, when the trigger is as elusive as it is in Whitehaven, as it was in Dunblane, and as it was in the sleepy village of Hungerford in 1987.
The reason for this collective national amnesia is that the alternative is too awful to consider - the only way we can sleep peacefully in our beds is to treat this as an anomaly. Without wishing to rationalise the clearly insane, the most notorious American shootings tend to be based on some sort of twisted logic, from the revenge-seeking outcasts of Columbine to the publicity-grabbing farewell videos of Virginia Tech. There is even some comfort to be found in the pantomime posing and videogame weaponry of US atrocities, which at least give society a recognisable framework for their anger - there is no shred of reassurance to be found in an apparently well-liked man waging his own lonely war across one of Britain's most scenic counties. Dwell on this too long, and suddenly every familar face from the pub is a potential killer. Far easier to forget until the next one comes along.
It is interesting to note how Whitehaven fits into the overall debate on guns in the US and the UK. When an evidently troubled individual's uncontrolled urges combine with a readily availabile arsenal of gruesome weaponry to deadly effect - as is often the case in US tragedies - we in the UK are quick to preach that this is an inevitable result of your lenient gun laws. The counter from the pro-arms lobby, however, is that it isn't the guns themselves that actually commit the crime - an argument all-the-more compelling, and unsettling, when the trigger is as elusive as it is in Whitehaven, as it was in Dunblane, and as it was in the sleepy village of Hungerford in 1987.
