The Shootings in Cumbria

There is really little more that can be said about the massacre of thirteen people in Cumbria, by Derick Bird on Wednesday, that has already been said. The dreadful scale of events really speak for themselves, a senseless bloodbath of a family member, a work colleague and solicitor, then random passers by who had that perennial awful fate of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by a lone gunman with a grudge - perhaps only ever known to him, and to no one else when he turned the gun to himself.

The media of course are running the story as lead. It is every bit as bad as is made out, a shooting frenzy that now takes its place in a ghastly trilogy, Hungerford; Dunblane and now the Lakes shootings. Of course the press and TV media are keen to look into Birds background. We hear tales of work troubles and arguments with other colleagues [taxi drivers] over fare touting, money troubles, disputes over a will with his murdered brother. There were dubious blown up photos of his son and his daughter in laws (who have nothing to do with the shootings) reactions to the crime. There was an equally dubious interview with a 9 year old kid who had a gun pointed at him; asking how it felt to have a gun in his face. Though the headlines are no where near as lurid (so far) as they could have been, and there is nothing as equally disgusting as the Sunday Express expose on the survivors of Dunblane coming of age, showing facebook pictures of them having parties and getting drunk. Bird seems to have been a quiet, ordinary man, not the local weirdo with a dodgy background; who just cracked. The blame game has begun in some quarters, with the police being accused of reacting too slowly. The police counter by saying Cumbria is a large county with a smallish police force, and has low levels of crime, so was swamped by the freak enormity of the crime. Both may be valid points. One commentator asked why they could quickly corner a wild cat on the M11 motorway in a relatively quick time, but not a gunman (presumably because tigers don't carry guns, and drive taxis, is a fair answer to his rhetorical question?) Littlejohn accused the chief of police in that area of insensitivity (he would know, the master of tact that he is.) after he said the area was now safe and "back in business", whether pragmatic damage limitation, or tactless, is really a matter of opinion. There will also be the eternal firearms availability debate, with the ultra prohibitionist on one side, and the pro guns on the other side. The weird phrase "guns don't kill people, people do" has already showed up on on line commentaries.

It is hard to try to explain the unexplainable. Why someone would be driven to blast away both family and complete strangers, even summoning them to their unwitting deaths. It shocks our common sense of humanity, and causes us to try to rationalise it, and human nature, with these debates mentioned above. Is it possible that there is in practice; nothing we can really do to completely stop these thankfully rare -terrible events from occurring?