Rob's Blog

In June, a woman and her sister were shot at her home by her estranged husband. Neighbours immediately rushed to help.

Armed only with a piece of wood. Mr Gibson and his 58-year-old wife Georgie, went to the aid of their neighbour, Vicky Horgan, after hearing gunshots.

Georgie Gibson tended the victims, while another neighbour looked after the children. This is an example of a community voluntarily coming together to help those in need.

The state, meanwhile, in the form of the police force and the ambulance service for which we all ‘donate’ so much money, waited it out in case the gunman was still at large and posed a threat. Later the two sisters died from their wounds. If the emergency services had arrived sooner they might have been saved.

An inquiry reported that the delay “could not be justified.” The head of Thames Valley Police said, “We need to rebalance the caution with which we deploy lethal force with our duty to protect the public.” In the Telegraph, Boris Johnson attributed the failure to the health and safety culture gone mad.

As soon as the call came through that a killer was on the loose, the cops didn’t leap into their armoured cars, with their Kevlar vests and their carbines.

Oh no, they acted in accordance with the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Manual of Guidance on the Police Use of Firearms, taken in conjunction with the Thames Valley firearms policy, and for 35 minutes, they stuck with their immediate decision – in spite of ever more insistent assurances that the coast was clear, and that the shooter had fled – that no policeman, no matter how formidably accoutred, should go in person.

The ineffectiveness of the emergency services in this case is indeed shocking, but the commentators I have mentioned have missed an important point. No police force in the world could have come to their aid in the time between the two sisters seeing the man with the gun, and their being shot. Without guns of their own they were helpless. If the sisters or one of those helpful neighbours had had a gun things might have gone differently. The situation may have ended in a bloodless standoff, or if one of the helpful neighbours had shot the attacker the ambulance crew could have gone to help without fear.

As it was, help may have arrived sooner if someone had reported that Mr Gibson was “armed” with “a peice of wood”. Carrying such an item with the intention of using for self defence makes it an offensive weapon in British law, and that makes Mr Gibson a criminal.

When I heard what sounded like someone smashing a car up at ten past twelve last night, I called the police. At half past twelve they appeared, looked around, asked me which way the perpetrators had gone and left.

What this demonstrates is that unless the police catch the crook red handed what they mostly do is gather evidence. What they mostly don’t do is show up in the nick of time and save the day. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the police. I’ve already argued on these very pages that it’s impossible for them to provide that kind of service.

It’s a shame I could do nothing more than run off and call the police. After all, I caught the crooks red handed. And perhaps they would have thought twice about what they were doing if they were likely to be challenged by passers by.

I’ve just been watching a BBC1 documentary called Vandals Under Surveillance. It presented video evidence and told various stories about people dealing with vandalism.

One story was about an estate where houses were being abandoned because it cost too much to keep repairing the damage, and selling up was impossible. “No-one was prepared to take a stand,” said the narrator, “until the council took action.”

No-one was prepared to take a stand, eh? Perhaps, as Louise Casey, head of the government’s anti-social behaviour unit suggested, this was just traditional British reserve.

Or was it, as David Carr so delightfully put it,

the fact that private citizens are forbidden to possess so much as a toothpick and even raising their eyebrows in defence of their homes, families or communities will result in their being dragged off to prison by the very people that are supposed to be protecting them?

The council’s solution was to bring in an expert who encouraged residents to gather video evidence. She said she was just “giving people the tools”. In the end, it turned out that all the vandalism and harassment was cause by three families who were eventually evicted. So that’s justice, then.

I can think of some rather more appropriate tools for dealing with vandals, and they would have sorted the problem out much more quickly.

Update: You can listen to David Carr talking about food legislation, or read about his radio appearance.

I was in a corner shop in Tooting the other day, when a gang of youths came in and started taking sweets off the shelves. The proprietors asked them to leave, and tried to get back some of their goods. Once outside the youths started trying to force their way back into the shop. Then they kicked the door until the glass broke, and then ran off.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” one proprietor asked another.
“What’s the point?”

“You should keep a baseball bat behind the counter,” one of my friends suggested.
“We’d get done by the police.”

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Texas,” I observed.

Lisa Potts, star of a new police recruitment advert, got her arm slashed by a machete wielding maniac while defending her nursery class. That was foolish; she should have just shot the guy.

Oh, wait…

It hasn’t appeared on their web site as I write this, but Meridian TV are reporting the story of a man who was run over and killed by the thief who stole his car outside Southampton Airport, just down the road from where I live. He foolishly stood in front of the car in an attempt to stop the theft.

What he should have done, obviously, was pull out his gun and shoot the thief dead. Oh, wait…

Luckily for the dead man, the police are reviewing CCTV footage in order to capture the thief.

Correction: This incident actually occurred in Liverpool, and the story can be found on the BBC News site. That’ll teach me to spend more time yelling at the TV than listening to it.

An article by Richard Poe about the Merced pitchfork murders is worthy of wider readership. Here’s an excerpt:

Jessica heard noises from the livingroom. Still half asleep, she rose from bed and walked to the kitchen. Then she froze. There was a man in the livingroom. A strange man. He was stark naked.

Jessica fled back to her bedroom and locked the door. Someone knocked. Then he knocked again. And again. Jessica picked up the phone, but heard no dial tone. The intruder had taken the receiver off the hook.

That’s when Jessica thought of her father’s gun. Mr. Carpenter had taught Jessica and the other children to shoot. Jessica had passed her hunter safety course and received her certificate at age 12. She knew that her Dad always kept a .357 Magnum in his bedroom.

In deference to California’s safe storage laws, however, Mr. Carpenter kept the pistol high up on a closet shelf, unloaded and out of reach of the children…

Poe also makes some wider points about the way stories like these are reported in the media:

According to a 1995 study by criminologist Gary Kleck, Americans use firearms to defend themselves up to 2.5 million times each year – or nearly 7,000 times per day. In 11 out of 12 cases, the attacker flees as soon as his intended victim brandishes the gun or fires a warning shot. Such incidents form part of everyday life in America, yet they rarely make the news.

The family of an armed robbery victim make the same mistake as Tony Martin in claiming that the solution to rising crime is more police.

In days gone by, [Ms Bates, whose mother was shot] said, “there was a bobby on this street. He would come in and have a cup of tea with us”.

Right… “Put down your guns, or I’ll arrest you with this hot cup of tea!”

Mr Blunkett, she said, “needs policemen that are approachable on the streets of Britain … We should not have to live like this. A policeman is a deterrent. That deterrent has gone.”

I’ll tell you what else is a deterrent: A high probability of having a 12 bore shoved in your face by an angry jewellery store owner. Of course, Big Blunkett is happy to go on perpetuating the myth that there can ever be enough police to protect us all.

Mr Blunkett said he wanted lessons learned during Operation Trident, the Metropolitan police’s campaign against gun crime in the black community, and initiatives in south Manchester to be spread across the country.

“The reality of the moment may well be the challenge of guns,” he added.

“But it will not be the reality tomorrow if this Labour government succeeds in getting a third term in office to carry forward our agenda.”

Mr Blunkett also confirmed that police numbers had reached a record high of 136,386, breaking the government’s target by nearly 4,000 six months early.

So everything will be all right as long as we keep voting Labour. They will fix everything! But wait, doesn’t the fact that there are more police and more gun control than ever while still people are being shot in their jewellery stores tell us something?

More police may help, but there can never be enough police. Criminals aren’t stupid. They tend to attack when there aren’t police around. This means that until everyone has his own twenty-four hour personal armed police guard, there will always be a chance that he can find himself under attack and defenceless in some dark or remote place.

People need to be allowed to take responsibility for their own safety. When they stop demanding that others protect them, they will be closer to that goal.