Saturday, March 05, 2005

What A Country II - Evil and Stupidity

What's the connection between my sons and a 27-year old underclass adolescent ?

They all enjoy using their air rifles.

The boys are taught never to point, never to leave loaded. Never have anyone in front of the gun. Targets are concentric paper circles, tin cans, or (a favourite competition shoot with friends) small balloons tied to tree branches on long lengths of string - quite tricky on a windy day at 50 yards.

The other, a lowlife from the notorious Easterhouse estate in Glasgow, likes to take pot-shots at passing firemen and two year olds. He killed the toddler.

There are two things you can do here.

You can try and do something about a culture that produces physically, if not socially, grown men who think sniping at strangers is a reasonable way to spend a Wednesday evening. You can try and do something about a culture, and a benefits system, that produces places like Easterhouse, visted in 1989 by Charles Murray before he wrote 'The Emerging British Underclass'.

Or you can just ban airguns. Take them away from law-abiding people. After all, it worked with handguns, didn't it ?

It's a great thing, the welfare state. The law-abiding pay taxes to house and feed the underclass (their drugs are usually bought with the proceeds of burglary). Then when a member of said underclass acts as you might expect, the law-abiding get one of their pleasures taken away. Because it's far, far easier to hassle the law-abiding than to do anything about the underclass.


NOTE - Easterhouse has probably had more written about its problems than anywhere in the UK, partly because of the presence there until recently of the holy fool Professor Bob Holman, who gave up a well-paid academic career to work with residents groups, work which produced an idiotic book and an idea - the idea being that large sums of taxpayers money should be given to residents groups. Perhaps until their leading lights are paid as much as a Professor of Social Work ?

(The idiocy consists of a complete refusal to judge the poor the way he would judge others. I find that patronising and disrespectful, treating the poor as children who don't know any better. But he is a saint - albeit an idiotic one. Talk about going the second mile.

One Sunday afternoon, I settled down to watch Rangers v Celtic on TV. The buzzer to our flat went and for once I told the boy to go away. A few minutes later, it went again. A neighbour shouted, "Mrs Brown is having her contractions, can you take her to maternity?" Reluctantly, I heaved the woman into the minibus. What annoyed me was that her husband refused to accompany her as he preferred to watch the game.

Words fail me.)


CONTEMPT OF COURT WATCH - of course the 27-year old underclass adolescent may be entirely innocent. The toddler might have been shot by a different underclass adolescent.

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