Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 289

Why Liberal policies endanger us, plus Mr Slippery, Princess Tony, Peking,My Reply to Mrs Cable, and the real victors of the Falklands War

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

Those of us who know what is going on in this country are often derided by smug, wealthy Londoners. They accuse us of ‘moral panic’ and of exaggerating the breakdown of our society. I ask these complacent people to consider the terrible death of Alan Greaves, attacked on Christmas Eve itself. He was on his way to play the organ at Midnight Mass.

 Instead he met evil on a suburban road, as it is now all too easy to do. Our safety on the dark streets does not depend on police patrols, which is a good thing as they have virtually been abolished.

 It depends on an invisible web of goodness and restraint, conscience and courage – all things encouraged by the Christian belief that Mr Greaves did so much to support, and which we celebrate and recall at this time of year. Yet these protections could not be relied upon.

 A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church. His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs. Yet no general conclusions will be drawn from this by those who take all the decisions in our society.

 Those who pontificated grandiosely about a school massacre in America will see no lesson in this, because it does not suit their views. The loss of Mr Greaves, a 68-year-old grandfather, has left a great dark gap in the lives of many people who loved, liked or respected him. But it is the manner of his death that ought to wake a feeling of alarm – and shame – in the minds of those who have subjected this country to a vast, 50-year liberal experiment.

We were going to be so enlightened and progressive that we would no longer have to be good. Authority, punishment, morality, self-discipline, patience, thrift, religion were all deemed to be outdated and unnecessary, not to mention repressive, backward and unfit for this wondrous new century. It was, of course, a terrible mistake, though none of those responsible will admit it, so it goes on and on.

And now we live in a country where an organist can meet a violent end on his way to a Christmas service, and the police can explain such an incident as ‘a robbery gone wrong’. Who thought of this idiotic, insulting phrase? Do our modern non-judgmental police think there is ever a robbery that goes right? The trouble is that they probably do.

***********************

THE horrifying undead figure of Anthony Blair is sniffing around the edge of politics again, hoping to revive his old campaign for the presidency of Europe. Presumably the great apostle of democracy has tired of making £4,500-a-minute speeches at power stations in Azerbaijan, that grubby despotism. Or he has made so much money his bank has asked him to stop.

 This reminds me of the many similarities between Princess Tony and his keen imitator, Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister. Both believe in nothing very much. Both loathe their own parties. Both were the future once, but aren’t any more. Old Slippery slipped himself into the papers last week by getting as wet as his policies have become since he failed to get elected on a Thatcherite platform in Stafford back in 1997.

 I have seen rare pictures of his face the night he lost, and his surprised disappointment is striking. But I am told there is evidence, mouldering in the archives of an Oxford freesheet, that it took him quite a while to come round to the positions he now so passionately espouses. He is said (does anyone have copies, from May and July 2000?) to have jeered at Mr Blair’s pro-homosexual policies as a ‘fringe agenda’ and condemned Labour for ‘ripping the last recognition of marriage from the tax system by abolishing the married couples’ allowance’.

What we definitely know is that he wrote to a national newspaper in December 2000, sneering at Shaun Woodward, the Tory defector to Labour who then occupied his Witney seat. Amusingly, he attacked Mr Woodward for supporting a hunting ban, and also for backing ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools’. Of course, Mr Woodward was behaving quite logically, hoping for a safe Labour seat, which he got.

 But why is MrCameron deliberately riling his own supporters by rushing through same-sex marriage, while forgetting his support for hunting and old-style marriage? My guess is that he knows he cannot possibly win the next Election (he’s right about that). So he is deliberately creating rows with traditional Tories, so that he can blame them for his defeat and general utter failure. You read it here first.

 *********

 

The Liberal Elite normally prefer to ignore me as if I were a bad smell. So I was rather touched by last week’s letter, published in The Mail on Sunday, from Rachel Smith, who is also Mrs Vince Cable – and probably thinks much as he does. She wrote to criticise my article about how cultural revolution and mass migration have destroyed the country we used to know. She accused me of nostalgia for the Fifties, and argued that independent-minded individuals could flourish without the married family.

She claimed that we need mass immigration, and that a property tax would narrow the gap between rich and poor. First, she needs to know that I have no great affection for the Fifties, which I recall as grubby, smoky and chilly, with bad food and a general feeling of skimping and unacknowledged national decline. I don’t want the past back. I just think we chose the wrong future. The best way of bridging the gap between rich and poor would be to rebuild the old middle class, open to all with talent. But it has been squeezed half to death by confiscatory tax, an expanding State and by the destruction of grammar schools – like the one her husband went to.

 It is in childhood that the stable married family promotes private life, allowing one generation to pass on its morals, faith, language and traditions to the next. These days most children are swiftly indoctrinated either by the TV or by the State, as their parents scrabble to pay the mortgage. As for her idea that we ‘need’ the skills of migrants, who does she mean by ‘we’? Certainly not the British-born people priced out of work by newcomers.

 If Britain does need these skills, then why can’t it impart them to the millions of young people already living here, now idle on benefits? Could it be because of the disastrous failure of comprehensive education, evident to almost every thinking person in the country, except for politicians like her husband?

************

Coming from a Naval family, I’ve grown to mistrust the claim that Mrs Thatcher saved the Falklands. It was the Royal Navy that did it. And I’d rather hoped this year’s Cabinet Papers would remind us that in 1981 the Iron Lady had approved the scrapping of the carrier Hermes, plus the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, and the sale of Invincible. If the Argentinians had waited a few months longer to invade, we would not have had a task force with which to win the islands back. As for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, bitter laughter is the only response to this stupid phrase.

************

Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it?  We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power. 

 

Killed on his way to church, the latest victim of smug 'liberals'

Those of us who know what is going on in this country are often derided by smug, wealthy Londoners.

They accuse us of ‘moral panic’ and of exaggerating the breakdown of our society.

I ask these complacent people to consider the terrible death of Alan Greaves, attacked on Christmas Eve itself. He was on his way to play the organ at Midnight Mass. Instead he met evil on a suburban road, as it is now all too easy to do.

Our safety on the dark streets does not depend on police patrols, which is a good thing as they have virtually been abolished. It depends on an invisible web of goodness and restraint, conscience and courage – all things encouraged by the Christian belief that Mr Greaves did so much to support, and which we celebrate and recall at this time of year.

Yet these protections could not be relied upon. A gentle, kindly man  could not walk safely from his home to his church. His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell.

The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs.

Yet no general conclusions will be drawn from this by those who take all the decisions in our society. Those who pontificated grandiosely about a school massacre in America will see no lesson in this, because it does not suit their views.

The loss of Mr Greaves, a 68-year-old grandfather, has left a great dark gap in the lives of many people who loved, liked or respected him.

But it is the manner of his death that ought to wake a feeling of alarm – and shame – in the minds of those who have subjected this country to a vast, 50-year liberal experiment.


We were going to be so enlightened and progressive that we would no longer have to be good.

Authority, punishment, morality, self-discipline, patience, thrift, religion were all deemed to be outdated and unnecessary, not to mention repressive, backward and unfit for this wondrous new century.

It was, of course, a terrible mistake, though none of those responsible will admit it, so it goes on and on. And now we live in a country where an organist can meet a violent end on his way to a Christmas service, and the police can explain such an incident as ‘a robbery gone wrong’.

Who thought of this idiotic, insulting phrase? Do our modern non-judgmental police think there is ever a robbery that goes right? The trouble is that they probably do.
 
He flushed the Tories down the drain, and you’ll take the blame

THE horrifying undead figure of Anthony Blair is sniffing around the edge of politics again, hoping to revive his old campaign for the presidency of Europe.

Presumably the great apostle of democracy has tired of making £4,500-a-minute speeches at power stations in Azerbaijan, that grubby despotism. Or he has made so much money his bank has asked him to stop.

This reminds me of the many similarities between Princess Tony and his keen imitator, Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister. Both believe in nothing very much. Both loathe their own parties.  Both were the future once, but aren’t any more.

Old Slippery slipped himself into the papers last week by getting as wet as his policies have become since he failed to get elected on a Thatcherite platform in Stafford back in 1997.

I have seen rare pictures of his face the night he lost, and his surprised disappointment is striking. But I am told there is evidence, mouldering in the archives of an Oxford freesheet, that it took him quite a while to come round to the positions he now so passionately espouses.

He is said (does anyone have copies, from May and July 2000?) to have jeered at Mr Blair’s pro-homosexual policies as a ‘fringe agenda’ and condemned Labour for ‘ripping the last recognition of marriage from the tax system by abolishing the married couples’ allowance’.

What we definitely know is that he wrote to a national newspaper in December 2000, sneering at Shaun Woodward, the Tory defector to Labour who then occupied his Witney seat. Amusingly, he attacked Mr Woodward for supporting a hunting ban, and also for backing ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools’.  Of course, Mr Woodward was behaving quite logically, hoping for a safe Labour seat, which he got.

But why is Mr Cameron deliberately riling his own supporters by rushing through same-sex marriage, while forgetting his support for hunting and old-style marriage? My guess is that he knows he cannot possibly win the next Election (he’s right about that). So he is deliberately creating rows with traditional Tories, so that he can blame them for his defeat and general utter failure. You read it here first.
 
Mrs Cable: Touching but wrong

The Liberal Elite normally prefer to ignore me as if I were  a bad smell. So I was rather touched by last week’s letter, published in The Mail on Sunday, from Rachel Smith, who is also Mrs Vince Cable – and probably thinks much as he does.

She wrote to criticise my article about how cultural revolution and mass migration have destroyed the country we used to know.

She accused me of nostalgia  for the Fifties, and argued that independent-minded individuals could flourish without the married family. She claimed that we need mass immigration, and that a property tax would narrow the gap between rich and poor.   

First, she needs to know that I have no great affection for the Fifties, which I recall as grubby, smoky and chilly, with bad food and a general feeling of skimping and unacknowledged national decline. I don’t want the past back. I just think we chose the wrong future.

The best way of bridging the gap between rich and poor would be to rebuild the old middle class, open to all with talent. But it has been squeezed half to death by confiscatory tax, an expanding State and by the destruction of grammar schools – like the one her husband went to.

It is in childhood that the stable married family promotes private life, allowing one generation to pass on its morals, faith, language and traditions to the next. These days most children are swiftly indoctrinated either by the TV or by the State, as their parents scrabble to pay the mortgage.

As for her idea that we ‘need’ the skills of migrants, who does she mean by ‘we’? Certainly not the British-born people priced out of work by newcomers.

If Britain does need these skills, then why can’t it impart them to the millions of young people already living here, now idle on benefits? Could it be because of the disastrous failure of comprehensive education, evident to almost every thinking person in the country, except for politicians like her husband?
 

Coming from a Naval family, I’ve grown to mistrust the claim that Mrs Thatcher saved the Falklands. It was the Royal Navy that did it.

And I’d rather hoped this year’s Cabinet Papers would remind us that in 1981 the Iron Lady had approved the scrapping of the carrier Hermes, plus the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, and the sale of Invincible.

If the Argentinians had waited a few months longer to invade, we would not have had a task force with which to win the islands back. As for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, bitter laughter is the only response to this stupid phrase.

Charles Dickens, Guns, Drugs and Christmas

Round about the time that the carols begin at King’s College chapel in Cambridge, I plan to disappear in to intensely private place that is Christmas, and I won’t be posting here until after Boxing Day (or St Stephen’s, if you prefer) is over.

 

There are now very few times when Britain is more or less united by a common feeling. Easter was overwhelmed by shopping years ago, and Good Friday is now a shocking and blasphemous occasion in which a minority try to observe its tremendous solemnity, while a heedless and indifferent world goes on all around them.

 

But Christmas somehow still manages to engage us, when all other Christian festivals from Lammas and Whitsun , to Candlemas and Michaelmas, let alone Lady Day and Martinmas,  have been utterly forgotten and erased from the mental calendars of British people.

 

Why is this? I think Charles Dickens has a lot to do with it . People who have never read the Prayer Book’s glorious Collect, Epistle and Gospel  for ‘The Nativity of Our Lord, or the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ (of which more later) are all familiar at first, second or third hand with the Gospel according To Charles, that great mixture of ghostly terror, moral examination, lush sentiment, grace and justice, called ‘A Christmas Carol’  and  will have absorbed the sentiments spoken by Scrooge’s nephew that  ‘I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut–up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow–passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.’

 

I have mentioned before this passion of Dickens for seeing life as a journey not in fact chosen by us, in which we were bound inexorably to meet people and events which we might well not welcome. There’s a  sound like a great bell, dolorous and rather menacing,  in some of the passages in which he expresses this.

 

As a child one shudders at the door-knocker which becomes a face, at Marley’s dreadful, dragging chain of cash-boxes and account books, commemorating decades of miserly meanness, and at the shrouded spirit pointing at Scrooge’s lonely and unvisited tomb. As an adult one recognises the grisly truth in the scene around the old man’s deathbed, as the unloved servants and tradesmen squabble over how to share out the unloved old man’s most intimate possessions. And there is also much truth in the moment at the Royal Exchange where his former business partners and rivals coldly observe his passing.

 

I can do without the later scenes of almost hysterical charity and forgiveness, myself. They are, alas, much less convincing than those in which Scrooge is warned, and in which Tiny Tim’s death is foreseen. Even so, it is in the partly sentimental hope that we might rediscover some part of our childhood faith in the inevitable triumph of goodness that we still embark on Christmas at all.

 

Mind you,  I’ve noticed that a lot of people who make a very big performance out of the tree and the decorations, who give the best and most elaborate presents  and have the most lavish Christmas feasts are precisely those who have absolutely no belief in the Christian gospel.

 

The festival survives in part because in the northern countries, there is an abiding desire for feasting and fellowship at this time of year, and Christmas meets it more than any other moment or ritual. So these dogged unbelievers are compelled to find the name of Christ, even if unwittingly, on their tongues for a moment or two.  I am told that in Scotland, where 50 years ago the New Year was overwhelmingly more significant, Christmas has in recent years become much more of an event.

 

I’m not surprised. The New Year, which was also very much the prime celebration of the Soviet midwinter, has always seemed to me to be fundamentally bleak. Because it centres on the midnight turn of the clock, it is unfriendly to young children and has a lot more to do with drinking than it does with eating.

 

Also, what exactly is it about? Once you get beyond about 30, the passing of the years is at best a mixed blessing, another milestone on the path to the tomb.  Whereas, as the great Gospel puts it, Christmas contains this claim: ‘That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto his own, and his own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God’. And the Epistle (itself quoting a much, much older piece of poetry) deals comfortingly with the cold, relentless passage of time in this way ’Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the Earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’ .

 

I’ll now turn briefly to some of the comments here and elsewhere on this week’s column (I intend to reply at a later date to Mrs (Vince) Cable’s enjoyable open letter to me which was published in the Mail on Sunday this week).

 

Of course I accept, and have in the past accepted here, the argument that the presence of guns in a society makes them more accessible, and so creates the greater possibility that they may be used in dreadful crimes. It’s undeniably true.

The question is whether it is a particularly important and helpful truth. The British prejudice on this subject is plainly that it is both important and helpful. This is combined with a belief that Americans are more  less mad about guns, and their laws reflect this madness.

 

I set out to undermine this prejudice by showing that America’s gun laws originate in the English Bill of Rights, that Britain had very liberal gun laws without mayhem for many years, and that such countries as Switzerland have an armed populace - and it does not itself lead to gun massacres on an American scale. Further, I point out that countries with severe gun control suffer these massacres.

 

By the way, I am grateful to the reader who points out that I am wrong about current Swiss law, and I apologise for getting this wrong.

 

Since 2007, the old rule permitting the keeping of ammunition in Swiss homes has been revoked. Guns may be kept, but no ammunition.  I didn’t know this, and should have. I don’t think this undermines my point unless there has in the past five years been a  great diminution of gun crime in Switzerland – has there? Does anyone have information? Likewise, does anyone have information on whether existing stocks of ammunition were collected, or new ones just not issued, or any other details of the operation of this law . I just think it’s important to acknowledge and confess to errors or omissions of this kind. 

 

Another reader also mentions ‘dementia praecox’ . I have discussed this briefly before. It’s been suggested to me that the original outbreak of this mysterious disease, an apparently serious and irreversible loss of reason, usually among the young, correlated with, and may have been connected with the widespread use of lead in food packaging, paint and plumbing towards the end of the 19th century. In other words, the ingestion of a chemical may have threatened their reason. This point will recur.

 

It’s my view that individual madness in humans is quite rare, and individual madness unexplained by some external intervention, rarer still. (Mad crowds, whether actual or electronic, are quite common, by contrast)  By external intervention I mean physical damage to the brain, either by blows or violent accidents,  or by the ingestion of some sort of drug or poison; or through enormous stress or shock which may not be actually physical, but which is too much for the human mind to bear (one thinks of ‘shell shock’ or the overthrow of the minds who suffer terrible inconsolable grief).

 

My point about knife attacks in China, or the use of cars by murderous maniacs, which is not unknown, is not that the casualties are the same (though they easily could be, and the injuries are grievous and certainly not to minimised) is that the availability of weapons is not really the issue. As I pointed out, some such attacks in China involve explosives. I only mentioned the particular attack in China because it had happened almost at the same time as the Sandy Hook massacre.

 

I have also said here before, and say again, that I have absolutely no desire to own a gun myself, having seen at first hand and in detail what guns can do to the human body. My point is an appeal to reason, not a defence of gun ownership itself. My view of gun ownership is that an responsible adult should be trusted to own a gun in a  free society, and that restrictions on such ownership are usually a sign of an unfree society. Having been trusted, he would in my view be wise to opt not to bother.

 

Also that, while gun ownership may *permit* such events as Sandy Hook to occur, it cannot be said to be the *cause* of them, and that those who misrepresent the facts to suggest this are being dishonest with themselves and with everyone else.

 

Now, in any democracy, there is a regular collaboration between people who want to deceive the population, and those who want to be deceived.

 

This is one of them. Some, who want to destroy the American right to bear arms because they think the liberal state should have a monopoly of firearms,  want to deceive. Others, who yearn for a simple explanation for an appalling horror – which they fear will one day come to them – want to believe.

 

Modern liberals, because they recoil from moral absolutism,  are opposed both to corporal punishment of naughty children, and to capital punishment of murderers.  They think nobody has the right to do such things. Likewise they do not believe in parental authority over children, or in schools where a body of knowledge is taught in disciplined instruction by teachers who know more than their pupils. Parents, who no longer need to be married,  are really no more than carers more or less licensed by the liberal state, and expected to surrender their children to collective ‘progressive’ care as early as possible. Teachers are facilitators, encouraging children in the independent discovery of knowledge, but without the tiresome bonds of authority or, heaven forfend, punishment and failure.

 

The consequences of this are that many more children behave badly. And so do many more adults, who never learned to behave as children. And also that homicidal violence (whose effects are disguised and diminished by advances in trauma care) becomes more common.

 

The liberal society also has another interesting feature, in which happiness is assumed as being a universal and attainable goal, and that those who fail to attain it can be medicated to help them be happy anyway (this has some of the same moral and philosophical roots as the other problems, but we won’t deal with them just now. The point is that this development leads to a particular policy, which is connected to the other two).

 

Yes, I’m coming to the point. Liberalism, which gibbers in horror at the idea of smacking little Barnaby when he misbehaves, is quite relaxed about drugging little Barnaby instead, to get his mind right and make sure he sits still in his tedious classroom,  and paying Barnaby’s parents a large subsidy for permitting this. In the USA, Barnaby is often actually given amphetamines to control him. In Britain, he is given a drug which is remarkably similar to amphetamines – amphetamines having been banned by law for general use for many years because of their known harmful effects.

 

Later, in his teens, Barney, as he has now become, can graduate to ‘antidepressants’, as several massacre culprits have done. He may take these for many years.

 

I won’t go into the problems of these drugs again here (try the index).

 

We still don’t know if Adam Lanza was taking any such ‘medication’, because authority and the media aren’t interested in this. They are only interested in rubbing the National Rifle Association’s nose in the dirt, either because they are anti-gun liberals or because they are flock animals who like have the same opinion as everyone else has. We do have the statement of a neighbour, reported early on by the ‘Washington Post’ to suggest that he may have been taking something. And then there is the ever-present possibility, in the USA as in Britain, that any adolescent may well have been using cannabis, a feature that is now considered unremarkable by the US authorities.  It simply didn’t interest them in the case of Jared Loughner, the Arizona mass killer, nor in the case of Rudy Eugene, the so-called Florida Causeway Cannibal who chewed the face off a homeless man, having first ripped off his clothes. One report said that toxicology experts found ‘only’ cannabis in his system. Marijuana’s brilliant PR campaign,  in which it is misrepresented as ‘soft’ and ‘peaceful’, has successfully taken a lot of people in,  hasn’t it?  

 

Liberalism, which also loathes the death penalty, must even so be mightily relieved that the culprits of these mass killings almost invariably end their crimes by destroying themselves.  For, if these killers really are acting out of their own will – rather than driven mad by chemical interventions – what possible just punishment available to the liberal state could match the crime they have committed?

 

It is far more likely that they are in fact unhinged. Loughner, who did survive, plainly long ago lost his reason, and the general lack of curiosity about how he can have gone so terrifyingly mad is deafening. I would say the same about the Norwegian killer Breivik (whose heavy use of Steroids and other drugs may have overthrown his mind, but has never been examined by the authorities) . He is so deeply unaware of the horror of his actions that he cannot possibly be sane.

 

If you don’t look, you won’t find. My criticism of ‘guns did it’ argument is not that it has no force at all. It has some. It is that it diverts us from discovering the real problem, and dealing with it.  

 

On that glum note, I shall wish you all a Happy, Peaceful and Blessed Christmas, a great light shining in the darkness which would otherwise encompass and overwhelm us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop and think - and you will realise that banning guns is a waste of time

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

 

Ask yourself this. Even if you had a house full of guns and ammunition, would you then murder a close relative, shoot your way into a nearby primary school and massacre as many children as you could?
Of course you wouldn’t.

You would have to be mad to do such a thing, and mad in a rather special way.
And if you were mad in that way, and had no gun, you might use other weapons. There are recent instances in various parts of the world of what appear to be attempted mass murder by car, or by knife.

Take what happened just over a week ago in Chenpeng village school, Henan province, in China. Min Yongjun stabbed an elderly woman before hurting 22 children (many very badly) with a kitchen knife.

So shall we ban kitchen knives? Or cars? Actually, most mass attacks in China – which like almost all despotisms has very tight gun laws – are done with either knives or explosives.

The important thing is that these attacks still happen even with gun laws.
What I am asking you to do here is to think. Don’t be herded into the standard liberal opinion, that the Sandy Hook School tragedy is the fault of America’s allegedly crazy gun laws.

Actually, Connecticut’s gun laws are a good deal tighter than Britain’s were before 1920. British gun law before then was so relaxed it made Texas look effeminate. Did the streets of Edwardian London echo to gunfire? Were school massacres common? No.

Were guns restricted here because of crime? No, they were restricted because the panicky British government thought there might be a revolution.

In Switzerland, to this day, most homes contain powerful military weapons and ammunition.

But gun crime is extremely rare there (unless you count suicide). Yet these massacres are a feature of modern life. They happen in countries such as Britain and Germany that already have severe gun laws.

Guns have been around for centuries, and high-capacity magazines have been around for decades. Guns in general are more controlled than ever. So a thinking person must look somewhere else for an explanation.

While the BBC and the papers have raged about guns, nobody has looked at the people who did the murders. There has been no great pressure to find out about Adam Lanza. Most reports make it plain that he was in some way mentally abnormal. Some suggest he may have been on one of the many powerful and poorly tested ‘medications’ that modern medicine casually inflicts on bored children who fidget in class, or on people who are just unhappy in various ways. There is, as yet, no clear answer. There may never be, as the authorities and the media just aren’t interested enough.

One of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris, was on such medication (as we know thanks to a Freedom of Information inquiry), and the other, Dylan Klebold, may have been taking mind-altering pills at some point before he acted, though his medical records are sealed – inexplicably, given the importance of the information. In many other similar massacres, pills are involved – Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’.

So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Then there are the illegal drugs that have been effectively decriminalised in much of the USA and Britain, especially supposedly ‘peaceful’ cannabis, now increasingly correlated with severe mental illness. ‘Medical Marijuana’, in effect the lawful sale of dope on medical pretexts, became legal in Connecticut earlier this year. Funny that, as we panic about guns we get laxer about mind-altering drugs.

Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people in Tucson, Arizona, had at one time been a heavy cannabis user.
And then of course there’s our old friend ‘care in the community’, under which people with quite severe problems are pushed out on to the streets so that mental hospitals can be closed and sold, and their staff made redundant.

There you have it. You, and MPs, and the media, can choose to think seriously about this subject. Or we can run with the flock bleating for tougher gun laws – and then wonder why it is that the massacres keep happening anyway.

A SMOKEY JOURNEY BACK TO MY YOUTH

The lovely picture of an old locomotive let loose on the London Underground, wreathed in its own home-made cloud, awoke memories of childhood Christmases that always began for me with a long steam-hauled journey through a glorious winter landscape. There’ll never be anything like it again, but simply thinking about it makes me feel warm all over.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in what for me is the most moving part of his book The Great Gatsby, wrote of ‘the thrilling returning trains of my youth’. The phrase is dead right. How lucky I am to have travelled on them. Whatever memories this emotional time of year conjures up for you, I hope you have a very happy and blessed Christmas.

REAL TORIES ARE BACK TO UKIP

Many of you said kind things about my article last week on the disappearance of the Britain we used to know. One of them wasn’t Boris (real name Al) Johnson, Mayor of London and – he hopes – future Tory leader.

Some of you inexplicably think that Ambitious Al is a Great Hope, and shares your fears. He isn’t and he doesn’t. He’s another liberal in Tory clothing. He chose to mock and caricature what I had said, and complacently asserted that in some magical way the Olympic spirit or the Queen would make all these millions of new migrants become British.

No wonder once-loyal Tories are switching in battalions to UKIP, if this is what Toryism offers them. UKIP certainly has its problems – but the claim that voting UKIP will prevent a Tory victory in 2015 is false. The Tories cannot possibly win in 2015, or ever. That’s yet another reason why they need to be replaced with something better. Voting UKIP is a good way of bringing that about.

VINDICATED FOR DEFENDING ANDREW MITCHELL

Back at the end of September, I defended Andrew Mitchell, though I am no fan of his and disapprove of his swearing.

I said the police seemed to have got above themselves, and that the Chief Whip  was mainly in trouble because he rode a bicycle instead of sprawling in a chauffeured car.

I added: ‘This episode will, I hope, rebound hard on those who seem to me to have abused their  positions to make trouble  for a Minister. They should remember who employs them, and who pays  their wages.

‘They are not paid to leak such matters to the papers. This is lawless personal spite, not law enforcement.’

I feel vindicated.

 

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What a Good Thing we Said No to Berlin Time

As I pedalled through the pre-dawn gloom to the station this morning, in pelting rain and rather later than usual,  I rejoiced that at least the plan for Berlin Time had been defeated.

 

This scheme would have tied our clocks to Central European Time, based on a  meridian a few dozen miles east of Berlin, undeclared Capital of the EU. This would mean that the stygian mornings of this time of year would extend until well after nine o’ clock. This is obviously unnatural and also particularly dangerous to early-morning travellers on foot or by bike.

 

The corollary, of course, would have been blazing daylight until after 10.00 p.m. in the high summer weeks, equally unnatural and unwelcome to those whose work depends on early rising.

 

Looking back, it is amazing that the plan was beaten, thanks to a small but dogged group of intelligent and courageous MPs - and I can’t help wondering how long it will be before this proposal rises again from its grave. It plainly has its origin somewhere in the great Blob of Euro-enthusiasm ,for there is no other explanation for the way it is brought back, again and again, to Parliament.  Alas, far too few people see through this. Ridiculous claims that the clock change will in some mysterious way benefit tourism and business are made and accepted without any attempt to verify them.

 

The very name of the last campaign ‘Lighter Later’ was fundamentally dishonest, because it implied that there was some sort of available pool of spare light, which could be tapped by this measure . Of course this isn’t so. If it was lighter later at one time of day, it would be darker later at another.

 

And then there was the strange rage of the clock-changers at my use of the phrase ‘Berlin Time’ . Why didn’t I call it Paris Time?, some asked.

 

These people simply refused to understand the simple point that time is actually based upon physical realities. There is such a thing as noon, objectively defined by the moment at which the sun is at is zenith in a particular place.  If you mark noon at the same time as Berlin does, then you are on Berlin time. Now, if you’re in Berlin, this makes perfect sense. But why would you do so if you were several hundred miles further west or east, and your noon was therefore significantly later, or significantly earlier ?

 

Well, there’s only one reason, and that is politics. It’s a ‘who whom?’ question. The time on the clock, if it varies from natural time,  is a sign of who’s in power in the locality involved. Free countries keep their own time. Subject provinces keep the time of their imperial masters.  There’s a rather fetching facsimile of the 1913 Bradshaw’s rail guide to the Continent on sale at the moment, crammed with imaginary journeys to lost cities across vanished frontiers, a huge treat for the fertile mind.  But it is quite clear from it that pre-1914 Europe, before the irresistible domination of Germany took shape in steel and concrete, did not set its clocks by Berlin. Paris time (sensibly, given its closeness to the Greenwich meridian) was in those days the same as London time. Amsterdam is half way between.  

 

Now, what I didn’t get into during the battle (because it would only have confused things) was the related issue of so-called ‘Daylight Saving Time’, under which we endure the twice-yearly silliness of pushing our clocks backwards and forwards. I am very sensitive to time (which makes long eastbound air journeys a nauseating nightmare for me, and which meant that I also never fully adapted to living in Washington DC, five hours behind my normal time, perhaps because I was always working for an office that was on London hours). I particularly hate being hurried forwards in the Spring , just as the days are lengthening quite satisfactorily all by themselves. Early risers (I’m a lark, not an owl) begin to notice the lighter mornings quite early in the year, when slug-abed types have no idea that the days are getting longer . I generally get a sort of jet lag for several weeks after the clocks go forward, dazed and irritable in the early hours.

 

I’ve never seen any evidence that this clock-shifting does the slightest good to anybody, ever, or ever has. It’s just one of those cranky ideas (the brainwave of a bug-hunter in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson,  who wrongly imagined that changing the clocks would give him more time to run about catching insects, and of a pestilential English speculative builder, William Willett, who couldn’t abide the fact that other people were asleep when he was up and about, and who liked  - groan - playing golf late into the evening and didn’t see why others shouldn’t suffer for his pleasure).  Somehow these unloveable people got political backing   – war, as usual, providing the supposedly unanswerable excuse for it, giving government a permanent pretext for poking its nose into people’s private lives and pretending ( what’s the logic, exactly?) that the war effort would benefit as a result.

 

People now assume this strange arrangement is normal, simply  because it’s existed throughout their lifetimes.  It’s the opposite of normal. If you want to get up earlier, get up earlier. If you want to open your school or business an hour earlier in the morning, explain that to those involved and see if you can persuade them to do it. Of course, you’d never get it past the unions.  But forcing everyone to do this by messing around with the clocks, and shifting the opening hours of shops, the timetables of trains and buses , and the broadcasting schedules of TV and radio, seems to me to be strangely dictatorial. ‘YOU WILL GET UP EARLIER!’, it shouts. To which I, a person who generally gets up before or at 6.00 a.m, reply ‘Why should I?’. But because nobody ever thinks about anything, it persists.

 

And here may be a point. I think this bossy scheme is most beloved by metropolitan late risers, media types and politicos, who seldom see the sunrise at any time of year, and who view going to bed as sort of defeat, rather than a welcome end to the packed day of the early riser. When the clocks go forward, they just wake when they always would have done, to find that a bit more of the day has drained away while they were snoring. Who cares? Not they. They’ve slept till they woke naturally  - whereas people such as me have to be hammered into groggy wakefulness by the drilling noise of the alarm, and faced with going to bed in the summer months when it is still more or less light.

 

Well, you might say, split the difference, as we do.  I don’t myself see why we should, though I can certainly see why we shouldn’t go any further along this strange route.  We don’t pretend, for the sake of it, that hills are a hundred feet higher than they are, or valleys a hundred feet deeper. Even under the ‘Passengers’ Charter’ we don’t pretend that trains are faster than they are, though the train companies do at least have compelling economic reasons for inventing new definitions of the expressions ‘reliable’ and ‘on time’. Note, though, it’s the  definitions they fiddle with, not the actual times. What is the solid, objective unanswerable reason for following this odd fashion? What measurable good has it ever done?

 

I can think of no other measure where we pretend that things are physically different from what they are for half the year. What’s more, give them an hour and they’ll try to take two. Having once conceded the daft idea that the clocks should be forced by the law to  lie, we open ourselves to the next stage, of having to be one hour out in winter, and two hours out in summer, and never, ever again having our own natural English time.

 

I’m actually surprised and saddened that more people aren’t angered by this, just as I’m filled with sorrow that so many people of my generation have weakly caved into metric measurements, dull, inhuman, inconvenient and unpoetic. I don’t think the pre-1914 people of this country would have been such a pushover, and it just reinforces my view that 1914 was the moment everything started to go wrong.

 

 

Ten Million Thanks

I am pleased to say the number of visits to this blog passed ten million sometime around noon yesterday (Tuesday). Alas, I have no way of telling who the ten millionth visitor was. But I am also pleased to welcome the gratifying number of new readers who have been coming here since I urged readers of my Mail on Sunday column to sample this site.

 

 

Peter Hitchens versus Sir Simon Jenkins - booking details

Those interested in attending the planned debate on drugs and the law, between me and Sir Simon Jenkins in Oxford on 17th March can find booking details here

 

http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-events-2013/sunday-17/the-oxford-debate-war-on-drugs-should-we-end-it-or-are-we-not-tough-enough

 

 

Gategate revisited

I here republish an extract from a posting I wrote some months ago about the Andrew Mitchell affair. Given recent events, it seems to stand up reasonably well.

 

'According to the original story, [Mr Mitchell] was told ‘ security rules mean they open the main gate as little as possible’.

 

Is that so? So do they keep two or three ministerial or ambassadorial cars waiting in convoys,  inside and outside , until there are enough of them to justify opening it? And do they tell their impatient passengers that if they wish to leave sooner they must get out of their cars and walk through the pedestrian gate? Do you know, I rather doubt it.

 

If anyone watched the gate all day, I think they’d find it was opening and shutting the whole time, and opening it for Mr Mitchell (or anyone else)  on his bike really didn’t make much difference to the daily tally. Short of shutting it the whole time, and building a tunnel for the occupants, it’s going to have to be opened quite a lot.  So why not for a cyclist?   I wonder how many cyclists pass through each day, and how many cars and vans? After all, here’s a conundrum. It’s illegal to ride a bike on the pavement, but legal to ride it on the road,  because it’s a vehicle. So why must it stop being a vehicle when it comes to opening a gate designed for vehicles? Again, it seems to come back to the second-class status of bikes and their riders.

 

So Mr Mitchell, despite his unpleasant foul-mouthed outburst, might have a sort of case.

 

Then other doubts come trickling in. How did this story reach the ‘Sun’ newspaper, exactly? Who told the ‘Sun’, and on what terms? We’re told that tourists and members of the public were said to have been ‘visibly shocked’. Have any come forward to say so? Did these outraged individuals tell the ‘Sun’ about the incident? Or did someone else? If so, who?

 

Were the outraged members of the public interviewed as potential witnesses by the outraged police officers? There are enough of them (police officers I mean, not outraged ones necessarily) around there, on both sides of the gate, to do this if necessary.  I’m faintly concerned about this because the tourists who hang around Downing Street are mostly from abroad and wouldn’t have known who Mr Mitchell was (most British people wouldn’t have done, then, either) . They might not even have known he was swearing, foreign swearing being a completely different thing from ours.   And it’s a noisy location. The last time I bicycled past it, which may have been last Wednesday, as it happened, there was a very noisy demonstration on the other side of Whitehall, which seemed to be something to do with legal protection for prostitutes, or ‘sex workers’ as they are now termed. The word ‘SLUT!’ was being used quite vigorously, if I remember rightly, cutting through the mighty roar of London’s traffic. Though not ‘Pleb!’ or ‘****!’.

 

Since then we seem to have learned a bit about the police officers involved. One was a woman. A connection, which seems to me to be pretty tenuous, was made with the murder of two policewomen in Manchester. This is a horrible event, but it doesn’t actually have much to do with this much less important moment in our national life. They considered arresting him under the Public Order Act, or so we are told.  Well, why didn’t they if they were so appalled?  Chief Whips are not above the law.

 

The evidence against him could then have been tested, first by the CPS and then on oath in a court of law. This, increasingly seems to me to be the most satisfactory ending. It’s been suggested that if Mr Mitchell disputes what has been said,  he should either sue the officers or quit, but I think a criminal court would be a better place.

 

There’s also a sad thing to add, about how police officers in general (some nobly resist, and I know it) have been transformed from a fairly genial bunch of public servants, generally ready to do a bit of give-and-take with anybody, into grim-jawed and humourless robocops, festooned with machine-pistols, tasers, handcuffs and big clubs, and got up like soldiers in some future fantasy of hunger and chaos.

 

When, long ago, I worked at the House of Commons, the coppers who guarded the building were of the genial type, big, often bearded, wise, infinitely experienced, discreet and humorous, and boy, did they work at knowing who all the MPs were. The moment the election results were in, they got hold of the leaflets and made picture directories. Within a week or two of the new Parliament assembling they could greet every member by name. significantly, they still wore the old uniform of tunic and helmet, and I am quite sure this made them behave more like sworn citizens in the office of constable,  and less like cops (the unlovely word the ‘Sun’ likes to use to describe British policemen and policewomen these days).

 

This was fantastic security, of course, better than any computer, because they also knew instantly if they saw people in parts of the building who shouldn’t have been there.

 

In those days, there were just a few crowd barriers at the entrance to Downing Street. And the coppers on duty were the old sort. The ludicrous, hideous Ceausescu-style barriers that are now there had not yet been built, and ‘security’ wasn’t the ultimate, unanswerable excuse for shutting off politicians from the public that it has since become, though by then we had had nearly 20 years of the IRA blowing up London, a much greater material threat than the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda’ menace.'

 

 

What if the Question Time Audience is Representative After All?

What if the BBC’s Question Time audiences are in fact truly representative of public opinion? It’s a favourite belief of beleaguered conservatives that the studio crowd assembled for this programme is in some way selected to reflect the BBC’s own view of the world.

 

But I am not sure that it is wise to cling to this belief. For at least 20 years now, the British public have been subject to a stream of propaganda and re-education all the more effective for being subtle. The borders are not closed. It’s not illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Conservative newspapers, magazines and books continue to be published. There are independent schools. People such as me appear on the panels of discussion shows, though under interesting conditions. 

 

Frankly, if the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had had the sense to allow such safety valves, they might still be in power. As long as the young were imbued with the regime’s world view, as long as mainstream TV seldom if ever departed from the agenda of equality, diversity, globalism, climate change, as long as comedy, drama and soap operas were all under the control of pro-regime ideologues, not to mention the book review pages and the bookshops,  supporters of the old regime could continue to live in a world of their own, while the government got on with its purposes.

 

British conservatism – I use the word widely – has really been talking to itself for the past quarter-century. Since the collapse of the Thatcher project, which was never that good in the first place, it has been an exile community, a bit like the Jacobites after 1745.

 

It  has enjoyed itself complaining about Labour government, but never really understood what Labour was doing or why. And it has, in its heart, repeatedly accepted Labour’s legitimacy and right to rule.

 

The final hours of the last majority Tory government ever, in 1997, were not a moment of grief and fear, but a gentlemanly departure, leaving the garden tidy as they went off to relax at the cricket. I never met a senior Tory in that era who genuinely felt robbed or sorry.

 

Yet the Blairites came charging into the seats of power, bursting with plans to transform the country irrevocably (Andrew Neather’s amazing outburst about immigration lifted the veil on a tiny corner of this immense project). The neutral civil service, already tottering, was simply destroyed. The Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, armed by Orders in Council with unprecedented and unconstitutional powers, became the head commissar of an irresistible, centralised executive. The independence of the House of Lords was smashed. Northern Ireland was sold to the terrorist gangsters. Even the monarchy was co-opted and made subject to Alastair Campbell, after the death of Princess Diana. Huge, irreversible steps were taken to merge our sovereignty with that of the EU, many of them involving the independence of the armed forces. And so it went on.

 

And the Tories sat about, making daisy chains,  until the day they believed inevitable, when some pendulum or other would swing them back into office. They never fought against the Blairite ideology. Most of them quietly accepted it.

 

Those were the worst years in which to be an ex-Marxist, seeing a government with at least four 1960s revolutionaries in it in senior positions (none of them open about their pasts or anxious to discuss them, let alone willing to renounce or condemn their past views -by contrast with my good self) , and listening to deluded old Tories saying ‘That Tony Blair, best Tory Prime Minister we ever had, haw haw’.

 

They seemed to think that because he hadn’t nationalised the ice cream industry, or raised the basic rate of income tax, he wasn’t the head of a radical government. Didn’t they understand that the Left these days cares about culture, sexual politics, open borders, the constitution and the ceding of sovereignty to supranational bodies, plus of course the expansion of a vast client state of welfare recipients and public service workers? No, they didn’t.

 

During that period, the Blairites sought to get the message across to the Tories – you can’t come back into office until you have surrendered to our policies. This was made plain by Mr Blair himself, at an amazing meeting in Kettering, towards the end of the 2001 ‘election’(in truth there was never any contest, so completely had Tory Britain conceded the right to rule).

 

He said ‘"At this election we ask the British people to speak out and say the public services are Britain's priority, to say clearly and unequivocally that no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools, Britain's hospitals and Britain's public services. Never again a return to the agenda of the 80s."

 

I was there when he said it, and I managed to ask him (it was a sparsely-attended occasion and the election was really all over) if he wasn’t presuming a bit, telling the Tories what they should think. He looked a bit vague and Bransonish, and avoided the point. By that stage he and I were both going through the motions.

 

But while all this was going on, the schools (backed by the BBC) were teaching everyone our new multiculti history, and our new climate-change dominated geography, and our new post- Christian sexual morality. And it worked!

 

A Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday showed that support for same-ex marriage among the under-35s is 73 per cent.  50 per cent of Tory voters b back it too.  It’s only among the pre-revolutionary population, the over-55s, that there is a majority against it, and it is not a very big majority.

 

I suspect most middle-aged people don’t really have strong feelings about the issue one way or the other. Christian sexual morality more or less collapsed when divorce-on-demand became legal in the late 1960s.

They’ve just realised that the majority is now in favour, and it’s simpler and more convenient to join in.

 

I’m not advancing an argument here, just stating a fact. I don’t use the phrase ’silent majority’ (I may have done long ago, but I can’t recall when) because I have long suspected that there isn’t one. The fact is that propaganda works, and people like being in the majority.

 

The question of what is right or wrong, on the other hand, cannot be answered by opinion polls, and never will be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking in the Wrong Direction Again

And still they Talk, and Still They Miss the Point

 

I have had to keep turning the radio off, during the news. I just get so cross, listening to BBC reporters assuming that the only issue at stake in the Connecticut tragedy is ‘gun control’.  I’ve said many times before that I don’t myself wish to own or use a gun. I have seen in detail what they can do.  But I also agree with the drafters of the English Bill of Rights (1689) and its American imitator a century later that a state monopoly of firearms is a bad thing, and is usually desired by despots. Of course this is more naturally obvious, and easier to understand,  in a largely rural culture, where a lot of people will have firearms in the natural course of events.

 

But as I ceaselessly point out, the gun laws of Great Britain before 1920 were so relaxed that they made Texas look effeminate, and the record shows ( see my ‘A Brief History of Crime’) that the widespread availability of legal guns in the late Victorian and Edwardian era was not accompanied by widespread use of them in crimes. Most of the few firearms incidents of the time (especially the notorious ‘Siege of Sydney Street’ )involved foreign political activists, and were quite unconnected with the general level of crime in this country. It is also always worth mentioning Switzerland, where almost every home contains a legal gun and ammunition thanks to that admirable nation’s long tradition of securing its independence through a well-trained citizen army.

Gun crime in Switzerland has always been, and still is, negligible.

 

There is no doubt that in some place and under some circumstances, the USA is a more violent culture than any in Western Europe. One could spend years discussing this, but would end up acknowledging that this is just one the ways in which the USA differs from other countries and cultures. Its history of frontier anarchy, slavery, segregation, and pioneering may have something to do with, as well as its often unintegrated and poorly-policed big cities.

 

By the way, an important fact that needs to borne in mind when studying American statistics is that a large number of gun deaths in the US are in fact suicides. I am not qualified to say how many of those involved, in another country, would have used another method and how many would have remained alive. I just think it’s necessary to recognise this. In 2010 the USA experienced 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. It casts a slightly different light on the totals and I wish it was mentioned more often. By the way, gun suicides among the young appear to be on the increase, which may be connected with the more widespread prescription of ‘antidepressants’ and other psychotropic drugs to the young. It may also be connected with the widespread use of cannabis, which seems to me to be under heavy suspicion of destroying the reason of some of its users.

 

 

My own experience of living in the USA, an affluent suburb of Washington DC (actually in the State of Maryland)

was entirely peaceful, probably more crime-free than any part of this country. A few miles away, in North-East DC, the nights resounded with the crackle of gunfire as (this was the early 1990s) the drug gangs battled with each other for supremacy. The gun battles all took place within the District of Columbia, which in theory had some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Neighbouring Virginia, which had some of the most relaxed gun laws ( an acquaintance, a Virginia State Prosecutor who never knew when she might meet one of her prosecutees, carried a pistol in her hand bag as a matter of course, but was careful to leave it at home when she headed into Washington. She had no reason to suppose that her potential assailants would be so scrupulous, but law enforcers can’t choose which laws they obey) , had by contrast much less gun crime. One of the many problems with gun laws, not much mentioned by their advocates, is precisely how they might be enforced. In a free country, it would be very difficult. And,a s the District of Columbia has found, the people who can most reliably be expected to evade gun laws are criminals.

 

These are all facts. Gun law enthusiasts, confronted with them, either flatly ignore them or become empurpled with moral superiority and start calling me rude names or claiming that I am a survivalist or want an armed populace.  This is a pity, as I suspect both I and they want the same thing, namely fewer murders, and especially fewer murders of defenceless children.

 

It’s been put to me that , whatever motivated the killer of Sandy Hook, the availability in his home of powerful firearms was part of the cause of what then happened. I completely agree.  In Britain, or an equally or more  gun-controlled country such as Germany or Finland, it would have been harder for the killer to do his crime.

 

Yet, as we see, comparable crimes have taken place in Britain (Hungerford and Dunblane) in Germany ( the Erfurt School murder) and Finland (Jokela and Kauhajoki). The question is what we can practically do to prevent these events, and which is the most preventable cause. But that is not the only flaw in this argument. Knowing what we know about the huge number of guns in the USA, if availability were the decisive issue, then we would see massacres of this kind almost every day. But we do not. What we really badly need to know is what influences the killers to pick up the gun and , above all, to point it at a fellow-creature and squeeze the trigger with the aim of destroying life.

 

None of these actions is remotely rational.  In most cases, the desire for celebrity can only be a posthumous one since so many of these people kill themselves or intend and expect to be killed by the police. Quiet why any sane person could hope to be famous after his death, for a mass murder, I am not sure. Usually, most if not all the victims are barely known to the perpetrator. Yet individual madness is, or was, very rare until recently. Crowd madness is another thing, but for a lone person to go mad, some major external force is usually necessary. Sometimes it is unbearable grief or horror, as in those traumatised by war. Sometimes it is physical damage to the brain, or the effect of a tumour or other growth within the skull.

 

In the case of the severe outbreak of so-called ‘Dementia Praecox’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I have heard it suggested that it was at least partly the consequence of the dangerous amounts of lead then found in food-packaging, household paints and plumbing. I was once told a curious story by the owners of a fine Victorian house in a small Georgia town, a bed-and-breakfast guest house, where I stayed the night. They said the house had been remarkably cheap because it had a reputation locally as a ‘suicide’ house, where owner after owner killed himself. When they renovated the building, they found that all the plumbing was made of lead, and stripped it out right back to the mains.

 

It seems to me to be quite within the bounds of possibility that many of our modern epidemics, including suicide among the young, could be caused by things they eat or drink, and that powerful chemicals, increasingly used to dose the ‘hyperactive’, ‘depressed’ ‘bipolar’ etc etc  might be the problem. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is so.

 

Now, it will be said that 99.99% of those who take these drugs do not commit mass killings. And, thank heaven, this is so. But if a small proportion do, and it turns out that these drugs caused the insanity which brought about the killing, then we can act in various ways, notably by monitoring those prescribed with such drugs more carefully, and keeping them away from firearms as a matter of course.

 

But if we find out that perhaps hundreds of the users of such drugs commit or attempt suicide, or suffer various other unpleasant reactions and side-effects. And if we discover (as we undoubtedly have ) that many antidepressants, tested by their own makers, are no more effective than placebos, then the users of these pills, and society as a whole, may be paying a high price for nothing at all. In two cases known to me, the prescription of such drugs (in one case to a young woman being stalked by a violent boyfriend, and getting no help from the police, who was not ‘depressed’ but reasonably frightened and unhappy, in another to a man whose wife had just died after a long and painful illness through which he had nursed her) was idiotic and was followed by various forms of misery.

 

This is why I call repeatedly for an inquiry into this issue.

 

 

Whatever the truth, we will not find it by refusing to look for it. I repeat, as I fear I shall have to do again, this catalogue of known facts. We would know more if we asked the right questions, but the media obsession with ‘gun control’ means that we often don’t.

 

Anders Breivik , the Norweigian mass killer, was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals. In his case, the substances were an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. Anabolic steroids were also used heavily by David Bieber, who killed one policeman and tried to kill two more in Leeds in 2003, and by Raoul Moat, who shot three people in Northumberland, killing one and blinding another, who later tired of life and killed himself, so adding to Moat’s crimes.

 

Steroids are strongly associated with mood changes, uncontrollable anger and many other problems. In my view, this link remains formally unproven only because no great effort has yet been made to prove it. A serious worldwide inquiry should be launched into the correlation between steroid use and violent incidents.

Likewise with so-called ‘antidepressants’, whose medical value has recently been seriously questioned in two devastating articles in The New York Review Of Books by the distinguished American doctor Marcia Angell. Her words ought to be reproduced and circulated to all doctors.

 

I pointed out some time ago how many shooting incidents involved people who had been taking these suspect pills. Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981. They were also found in the cabin of the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine massacre culprits had been taking a powerful antidepressant. (Washington Post, 29th April 1999, confirmed by FoI inquiry by Peter Breggin, autopsy showed ‘therapeutic levels’) . There were traces of it in his body. We simply don’t know if his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, had been taking such medication. His medical records, apparently, are sealed. I cannot think why this should be the case, but apparently it is. Can anyone explain?  

 

Then there are the dangerous illegal drugs that are increasingly common since the State stopped bothering to prosecute users, or even (in many parts of the US) to accept ludicrous claims that smoked or eaten marijuana can be medically valuable. Jared Loughner, who smiled so beatifically (like the equally unhinged Breivik) after murdering six people in Arizona, had been a heavy smoker of cannabis for much of his youth. The use of this allegedly ‘soft’ drug is increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, often severe.

 

It is hard to get clear information on this, but the author of the Virginia Tech school shootings, Cho Seung-Hui may also have been taking drugs for “depression.” He certainly had done so in the past, and there are those who believe that effects of these drugs are persistent, and there is evidence that ceasing to take them abruptly may trigger episodes of unreason.

An inquiry, that's all I ask for.