Jackie Danicki

Brian’s photo and brief quotation on Tony Blair’s “strategy” to combat gun crime pretty much says it all - apart from that it is truly astonishing how many people are truly astonished that, when only criminals and the police have guns, you get gun crime. Fancy that!

I just accidentally heard some of Radio Four’s programming - something I try to avoid studiously, for reasons soon to be revealed - and was treated to a puff piece on Joan Baez and her anti-war activism (what year is this again?) followed by an interview with teenage girls about guns, which was sandwiched by the strains of We Shall Overcome (I am not making this up).

One of the girls made a good point about the fact that lots of the boys who have these guns are more afraid of those around them than they are of the law, so it makes perfect sense to arm themselves. You don’t have to live in Brixton to sympathise with that view, whether you choose to pack or not. (Some mystery about whether or not I carry a gun would probably protect me from further muggings and assaults, but no, I don’t.)

Anyway, towards the end of the interview, one of the girls said that the sort of girls who are talked into holding guns for men are ones who “have been damned to a life of working retail”. Isn’t this mindset - that, in life, one is damned to one’s destiny as surely as one is damned to birth defects; that, in fact, one has no choices in life which can improve one’s life very much - a massively bigger problem than Britain’s gun crime? Unfortunately, Radio Four didn’t think that a question worth asking.

Filed under: Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend