The "gun thing" again

I started this blog with the 'Aha!' thing.

According to the BBC on Sunday morning [18/02/07] Britain is experiencing a crime wave, represented by a cluster of murders of children by apparently random and motiveless gunshot violence. A hushed Beeb voice intoned unctiously "murder by gunshot" against a stock background photo shot representing an arsenal of the firearms, which we are to believe now litter the streets of England.




Ever since the British P.M. [Phony Haire] almost unilaterally outlawed private handgun ownership in Britain, in the wake of the Dunblaine kindergarten massacre about eight of nine years ago, gun related crime has apparently increased inexorably, from a time when there was not very much to a time when Sky television reported in a year end summary in 2005 that there had been ten thousand such incidents in 2004; thereby proving the old -- 'can't we discredit the idea somehow'-- axiom that 'when you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them'.

I have raised this before and on each occasion my position was refuted by anti-gun lobbyists on grounds that have never made sense[to me].

Various reports by amongst others Sky Television, have over the past years been reporting this rising trend in gun related incidents, not all of which result in murder.

Another report, in a British women's magazine that I have in front of me states: 'Is your child carrying a knife?'. Apparently a sizable number of British kids routinely carry knives to school to protect themselves from other kids, who intend to attack people and may choose them. Bullying is a huge and omnipresent threat to schoolkids as any Harry Potter fan can attest, in fact school bullying is an integral part of English youth literature ranging all the way back to 'Tom Brown's Schooldays', and forms a pretty substantial theme in 'teen' movies. According to Sky increasing numbers of kids allegedly carry illegal guns to and from school [in Britain] to protect themselves against knife wielding school thugs.

Then on top of this a recent report on a survey of so-called 'rich nations' published by the UN child agency UNICEF carried in The Star newspaper on Valentines Day painted a grim picture of life for, [presumably] 'disadvantaged' children in Britain ranking them 18th out of 21 countries- The headline reads, 'UK the worst place for kids to grow up'. Apparently Britain is a terrible place for a kid to find trustworthy friends with whom to hang out.

Now for all the hysteria in the POM media none of this apparent rise in violence is remotely on the scale that we experience in our own territory, but it is not what would be expected in a place dedicated to human rights, with an allegedly left wing, bunny hugging, single mother oriented government intent on cushioning all its weaker citizens from the alleged worst evils of living in a market based economy. What has gone wrong?

In the mid nineties when I published the Buffalo Hunters, a crime adventure novel set in Jozi, Zone One, during the post-revolution upheaval, the whole of Britain experienced some 1100 murders a year while that was roughly the number of murders in the police neighbourhood where I live, which at that time covered roughly 350,000 people. Nonetheless there are intriguing parallels between the rise of apparently random and almost motiveless violence in Britain that I keep reading about and what seems to be happening here. [Presumably we shall soon begin to hear the familiar argument that Britain may lose the Olympics because of the high levels of gun violence in the country.]

The policies followed broadly in our country [SA] are modelled on the dominant social philosophy of that country[ Britain]. That philosophy seems to be promoting a culture of alienation so extreme that Karl Marx would have had to write another entire book to rationalise why this happy ending to the Socialist vision is proving so darned elusive. British New Labour policies do certainly seem to be having a negative effect on the poor and the dispossessed, because all the aggression and violence reported constantly seems to engage the poor and the dispossessed or the estranged. Perhaps it has something to do with living in a 'rights' based society that is simultaneously perceived as 'rightless' by those whose destiny is society's dustbin- here I come ready or not.

On the few occasions I ever visited that curious island on which I was born and from which I migrated at the age of six months to live [inadvertently] in an urban Afrikaner slum neighbourhood amongst people who's sole objective was to 'Slaan die soutie' I found the average youthful inhabitant of most places to be as aggressive and prone to violence as those where I grew up uncomfortably for the most part. Sixty years of Social Massaging has not softened that inherent streak of violence in what AJP Taylor once described as the most bloodthirsty tribe to have ever walked the planet. The Yobbos rule it seems.

In our country we are embarked on a complex scheme to effectively disarm the private civilian population, largely prompted by a century's old desire to prevent so- called 'black' people from having guns. We have also, perversely, introduced a new 'education' system that has just successfully produced its first harvest of failed kids from its first post-revolutionary matric crop [remember 3,000,000, plus/minus started in 1995 and 360,000 finished twelve years later in 2006- leaving the rest [89%] on the rubbish heap] What happened to all those kids? We don't know- the politicians are too busy enriching themselves while the going's good to have time to notice the messy shit piling up on the blanket. Could they be out 'robbin, killin, rapin n lootin': stoned out of their minds on Tik.

We signally failed to deal with the Grade 11 'failures' from last year [as predicted] so now we are producing the second crop of 'failures' - the new school drop out generation - What do we do with all these surplus people given that even with their relatively sophisticated welfare state the POMS are failing their own kids? This is the seriously vexatious question to which none of us [me included] has any answer- save [in my case] that presented by Nietzsche in the guise of King Midas and his associate Silenus.

'King Midas: What is man's [a person's] greatest happiness
Silenus: NOT TO BE. TO BE NOTHING. But the second best is TO DIE SOON.
What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach- NOT TO HAVE BEEN BORN.

Interestingly Steven Levitt the new 'Wunderkind' of the Economics world recently aroused a storm of controversy with a brilliantly executed piece of research in which he set out to discover the real source of the unexpected decline in serious crime in the United States during the 1990's after the rising trend throughout the eighties had pundits of the time predicting anarchy and chaos [and incidently provided a much needed boost to the non-career of the indefatigable Charles Bronson with his 'Death Wish' series 1-5].

Levitt proved as conclusively as it is possible to prove anything in the social sciences that the fifteen million aborted entities [those who were never born] that occurred between the Roe v Wade decision in the mid sixties and the BEGINNING OF THE decline in criminal behaviour in the nineties coincide to form an inescapable [and extensively validated] conclusion. Unwanted children grow up to become social misfits and latent criminals. [See Steven Levitt: Freakonomics: 'Where did all the criminals go?']. Curiously Levitt's conclusions have been the subject of massive assault by both sides in the Abortion controversy: the religious right are freaked out with denial and the liberal left are horrified at the eugenic implications of their fondly held position.

I wouldn't know whether Levitt could carry out a similar exercise here, and anyway his conclusions indicate that it is still a decade and a half too early to identify whether the allegedly factory-scale abortion process that we carry out now in our own country will eventually contribute to a similar decline. Anyway with half the country's population under the age of 21 we do not have the same demographics as the USA. In the meantime we are handling the living dead by churning out unwanted drop-out children daily, and when life on the streets, or the suburbs or in the traditional 'hoods becomes terminally commoditised then life itself is so meaningless as to be random, arbitrary and, for a continent still awash with real wild animals quite normal- Killing becomes prosaic.

So one thing I can predict with some certainty however is that the amount of gun related violence will continue to rise. Disarming the citizen will not help to reduce the violence and may act as a spur given that the gunmen can then go about their business unmolested, as it were. Certainly that is the increasingly obvious inference to be drawn by the rise in gun crime in the UK. The Brazilians recognised that logic in a recent referendum on the issue, on which subject I blogged last year, in which the Brazilian citizen rejected gun control as a solution to gun violence.

We are in an age when rage knows no ending, until eventually the citizen will re-arm itself against that rage. Whether this re-arming takes the form of active armed self defence, the development of 'Safety Firearms', or a shift to a new moral paradigm is open to whatever comes- but ultimately we will be forced to accept reality or this magnificent bubble we have contrived, called the global economy, will come crashing down around our ears like the glorious fantasy that it is.

'Remember to move your head, the bad guys are always shooting at the Moustache.'
Jean Bultot. Belgian.
Alleged mass murderer, former bodyguard to Panamanian dictoator Albert Stroesser, and sometime firing range instructor to Tembisa Hi-jack gangsters.

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