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The extraordinary bloodshed yesterday when an ordinary man with a grievance ran amok and killed a dozen people in one of the quietest, most law-abiding parts of England has shocked the nation.
Derrick Bird was a man without any previous history of violence; he had the reputation of being a pleasant if quiet individual.
And if he had, as seems to be the case, a dispute with his family over a will, or with fellow taxi-drivers over work, this is no more than the trials that many people have to bear with every day. There was no way of knowing that he would indulge in a homicidal orgy. And when it took place, it would appear that the local police did the best they could to warn local people about the danger; they also unhesitatingly accepted help from neighbouring forces.
In other words, this is a tragedy that should not evoke a kneejerk, legislative response. Sometimes people do terrible things unaccountably, and there is nothing whatsoever we can do to prevent a recurrence, except to avoid glamorising these tragic figures in any way.
There will undoubtedly be calls, for instance, to review our gun laws as a result of the killings. But the reality is that British gun laws are already stringent. In London, we do have a problem with gun crime but it is the illegal ownership of weapons which is the real problem, as investigations by this newspaper have shown.
Here, the challenge is to implement the law as it stands, not to change it. Offences involving guns amount to just 0.3 per cent of total crime.
We should, then, be wary of any efforts at hasty legislation to prevent these tragedies happening again. The rule is that if we legislate in haste, we repent at leisure, and there are any number of measures such as the Dangerous Dogs Act to prove the maxim.
Sometimes, there is no point in pretending that there is anything we can usefully do in the face of tragedy other than to deplore the actions of the perpetrator and keep the victims in our thoughts and prayers. That's true here.
Mr Gove gets going
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has lost no time in addressing the problem of failing schools. He has announced that those that have been subject to special measures by Ofsted inspectors for more than a year will be taken over by academic providers with proven expertise and turned into academies. Their heads will be sacked. Inevitably, teaching unions are uneasy that this is too short a time-frame to turn round a problem school.
Granted, Ofsted does already take seriously the issue of bad schools; those that are taken into special measures are given advice, help and a timetable for reform. Many poor schools respond to this approach in a matter of months.
Nonetheless, Mr Gove is right to take a short, sharp, shock approach. It may be in the interests of poorly performing heads to give them time to turn failing schools around but Mr Gove is acting in the interests of pupils, not of those who run schools.
And the trouble is that if reforming a bad school takes more than a year, its unfortunate pupils may suffer lasting consequences in terms of the examinations that will determine their future. This urgency is what parents want; let's hope it works better than the failed initiatives of the previous administration.
Go for it, Boris
The mayor's bid to use trespass laws to evict the self-styled "Democracy Village" of anti-war protesters from Westminster Square comes to a head in the High Court today. We are right behind his efforts. Democratic protest about the war in Afghanistan is one thing; a standing eyesore in an important public space is quite another.
Reader views (2)
Thank heavens for the sound common-sense of the Evening Standard.
As you say, "Sometimes, there is no point in pretending that there is anything we can usefully do in the face of tragedy other than to deplore the actions of the perpetrator and keep the victims in our thoughts and prayers."
- Rick, Ash, Surrey, 06/06/2010 18:22
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"Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals, but the question is: who is most likely to obey the law? In the case of a ban, every instance we have data for shows that when a ban has been imposed, murder rates rise. In America, people are all to familiar with the increased murder rates in Chicago and Washington, D.C.. But supporters blame those gun control failures on the ease of getting guns in the rest of the country. Yet, even in island nations such as Ireland, the U.K., and Jamaica -- all of which have imposed bans -- their easily defendable borders and lack of obvious neighbors haven't stopped drug gangs from getting either drugs or the guns that they use to protect their valuable product.
Just as Mexico's President Calderon showed last week, it is always easy for politicians to blame crime on guns. The crime data in Jamaica shows the same thing as the crime data in Chicago and Washington have shown. It is the law-abiding, good citizens, not the criminals, who are disarmed by gun bans."
A quotation from
John R. Lott, Jr., who is a FoxNews.contributor. He is an economist and author of "More Guns, Less Crime."(University of Chicago Press, 2010), the third edition of which was published in May.
- Mitch Buchanon, Santa Barbara, 03/06/2010 19:58
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