Seriously now.
British society is convulsed (well the media is and politicians are): someone fired three shots from a pistol across a Liverpool pub car park and a football mad 11 year was hit in the neck and killed. The killer was a mid-teens white boy in a hoodie riding a BMX bike. BBC catchup here.
There was decent time for mourning (five days), and now the politicking has started. Liberal Burblings contrasts the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders reponses here (the comment from Linda Jack is pertinent, too and having been involved in youth work I agree with her). From the right an intelligent post from Dizzy Thinks here. The politics really gets going in his comment section. There are political considerations sure, but the basic problem is one of animal behaviour, our inescapable biology.
Cram a lot of rats in a cage, they will fight and may kill one another. Britain is a small island with a lot of people on it: 60 odd million, many concentrated in cities and towns that sprawl into one another. London, the Thames Valley, Birmingham and the West Midlands, the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds Lancashire/West Yorkshire conurbations.
People are increasingly stuffed together and stressed, and I mean that in a biological as well as a human ‘oh god I’m so stressed’ manner. And sometimes, our animal natures makes us crack and fight. It doesn’t excuse what the killer did on the BMX: he has to be held responsible for his actions, but…we evolved as creatures of the savannah and forest margins. Towns are a 10,000 year old idea. The industrial revolution which really sucked large numbers into shitty cities is but 200 years old.
Large scale, high density urban living is a very new and an uncontrolled experiment. This young man’s murder is a tragedy, but unless we realize our animal natures occasionally override our shallow, recent civilization and the norms we wrongly think so profound, and factor this into our responses, we will never solve these problems.
I suspect we won’t solve them. Angry, ill educated young men will always crave the power of a gun and long to see what it does when fired.
