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September 01, 2005
Are we suffering from mass paranoia?
It seems to me that this nation is now in the grip of paranoia. Reading Tim's post on An Englishman's Castle about the reaction of the North Yorkshire Police to a report from one of the usual crop of completely wet and stupid morons who delight in reporting these things, about a father and son arrested and held for five and a hlaf hours on "firearms charges" for playing with a toy pistol and rifle BOUGHT AT THE DAMNED SCARBOROUGH SEASIDE STALLS WHERE THEY WERE ARRESTED makes my blood boil! Especially after the weekend event where two teenagers and two older youths burst into a South East London baptism party, shot a woman in cold blood and then robbed the rest of the party with REAL GUNS!
Ever since Blair and his shower of complete idiots passed legislation on the owning of handguns shortly after coming to power, gun crime has gone through the roof! What is worse, guns are now more readily available then ever before - to the criminal element! Worse yet, these new generation of armed criminals are more ready to use these weapons than ever before, viz the events of last Saturday. It would be alarming enough if this had not resulted in yet another phenomenon - now we have an army of pathetic and stupid individuals who patently wouldn't know one end of a gun of any sort from the other, who take it upon themselves to phone the police and report every child or adult seen playing with anything that even looks like a gun! We have, as a result, had people shot for carrying table legs wrapped in a suspicious looking shape, we have armed responses to a pair of children seen in a suburban street playing cops and robbers with toy pistols and the latest folly, a father and son arrested at gunpoint on a beach for playing with a pair of toy guns bought on the seafront.
Even more worrying is the police response. Having really screwed it up, by not checking what they were dealing with and then by not admitting that they had got it badly wrong when any halfwit should have been able to tell instantly that they were dealing with toys, they carried through the full process of arrest, caution, fingerprinting and DNA sampling of the father and son! I bet they haven't told either that their DNA will now be on the national register for life - despite what Mr Blair and his sycophants publically declare.
This "risk aversion" syndrome is turning us into a nation of complete wimps and informers. The East German Stasi would have been proud of the way people are informing on their neighbours and on anyone they see in the street. This is the same sort of idiocy which informs on a father disciplining a badly behaving child at a supermarket - but then fails to deal with a child abuser and potential murderer in a community! The shooting of the Brazilian "suspect" recently has also raised a number of rather ugly questions, not least why the armed response officer emptied a full magazine into the victim. Surely a "double tap" would have been sufficient? I know I have commented that the victim in this case should have stopped, but from what has emerged since, the whole thing seems to have been a monumental SNAFU which has only served to increase public fear and concern.
This mass paranoia is being fed by the media and used by both Whitehall and the politicians to manipulate public opinion, create a climate of fear and to introduce ever more restrictions on the personal liberty of the individual. Ironically, it is this same bunch of cretins who insist that "Care in the Community" of dangerous psychotics, schizophrenics and other mentally disturbed people is about respecting their "right" to normal life and privacy!
No wonder we have paranoid morons phoning the police to report toys and childrens games! A pity the police don't behave a bit more sensibly as well!
(The original blog post on this can be found on Kim duToit's blog.)
Posted by The Gray Monk at September 1, 2005 11:30 AM
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