Thursday 11 October 2007

For the avoidance of doubt

Intrigued by the comment to the previous post, a little 'desk research' uncovered the following.

Since the start of 2007, eight young people have lost their lives in shootings - six in London, one in Manchester and now the killing of 11-year-old Rhys (J) in Liverpool.

A Times survey found that a firearms offence was committed once every five hours in Great Britain in the six days after Danielle Beccan's death.

For full details please see UK Gun Crime

One can only assume that anyone who interprets the above as a 'low frequency' of deaths from firearms is on a sales commission from the ammunition suppliers!

3 comments:

  1. Meant to comment here earlier but better late than never. Horrifying statistics! I'm tempted to go into a middle-age rant in the vein - what's happening to this country blah blah...but instead I wanted to congratulate you on being so reasonable.

    We humans love to deceive ourselves. We go on instinct so much of the time and so often life is actually counter-intuitive. Who would have believed that there could be so much gun crime in this country? We aren't meant to be a gun-culture in Britain - that's the job of the US - so we stop listening to the stories. Produce reliable figures and the argument is over. I just wish it was as easy with some of the other scientific and moral debates out there...

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  2. Thanks for the comment Daisy, its feedback like this that makes posting worthwhile! I strongly suspect that a significant part of the reason is the complete denial of the consequences by the perpetrators. I was interested to read a recent article about young soldiers in Afganistan who were 'shocked' when they came to understand the consequences killing and seeing friends killed. As a guy in gun shop in Las Vegas told me (true story!) guns are extremely unforgiving.

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  3. This is so true. Young people even of eighteen or so do not, in my experience, understand fully the consequences of their actions and the longer we infantalise them by forcing them to stay in school and college, the older they will be before they grow up properly.

    Re the soldiers in Afghanistan, I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 for the first time last month and was appalled to see the soldiers talk about how they would go into 'battle' with loud rock music playing inside the cab of their tanks, as if it was a game.

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