Gun Crime in the UK

Inches of newspaper columns over the world are dedicated to the horrific shooting spree in Cumbria, 12 people dead and many injured. So anything I write will be second hand and no new ‘news’ will come of that. We all know what happened - a man took a gun and started killing his family, friends, neighbours and work colleagues and then shot himself.

 

What bothers me is why middle aged men with deep seated anger seem to let loose in small British villages.

Random shooting sprees don’t occur in busy metropolises; they don’t happen in crowded towns; they happen in picture postcard villages and small hamlets in the UK.

I wanted to explore why that happens and was amazed at what anthropologists make of it all.

 

The same thing happened in Dunblane in 1996 and in Hungerford in 1987 - middle aged men who killed innocent children, adults and friends in the local community and then turned a gun on themselves.

 

The only difference was that the Hungerford killer was in his late 20s. I have refrained from naming the murderous men as a mark of respect - not to make them ‘famous’. This isn’t about the men who kill in particular but about why this happens in the middle class small towns.

 

There hasn’t been a shooting spree in a inner city sink estates, the places we most expect them to happen, the places where the TV people love to show horror stories of human decay and the demise of British society. The mass shootings happen in the places where we go to be amazed at the lovely chocolate box houses and the ‘know your neighbour’ streets. I have photographs of Cumbria, of the cute painted houses and the old vintage cars; I love that place and often wished I could live in a place like that myself.

 

I live in Glasgow city centre and often complain that I don’t know my own community, I am out of touch with my neighbours. The small villages of middle England and Scotland always make me feel jealous that I don’t have that cosy neighbourly feeling they seem to possess.

 

Yet that nostalgic homely feeling that we yearn for seems to have a distinct underbelly which anthropologists have been studying for years and have a few enlightening theories about.

 

This isn’t a gang of inner city teenagers in ‘hoodies’ going mad and stabbing multiple people. This is grown men who lived, worked amongst and took part in their own community going home to load a gun and kill the people they know.

 

Their areas aren’t bogged down with abject poverty; they don’t suffer the same localised violence and destruction that is an affliction of decayed and crowded housing in the city. Yet they tend to house the worst kind of killer, the man who keeps guns and a deep mental illness that will be unleashed on his own people when the time suits him.

 

There will be many theories as to why this latest mass killing took place and my condolences go out to the people of Cumbria who suffered at the hands of this evil man; none of us reading this can comprehend the shock and devastation he has caused.

 

Small towns and villages have a distinct personality: the village as a whole represents the character that the community wants to reflect. They all try to keep their environment as nice as they want people to see it from the outside and this can lead to tensions within small groups. This kind of behaviour doesn’t manifest itself within a sprawling city.

 

So, according to the psychologists dealing with small town/village mass killings, that one person who feels disenfranchised or isolated decides not to take it up at a council meeting, but chooses to hurt the village the most, by taking down everyone they can in a short space of time. They will mark that area for ever with the worst deed they can do, by killing their own people and then killing themselves.

 

The result is devastating and leaves the survivors in shock, horror and life wrecking grief forever. The killer has left his legacy and they really will never forget him. By making himself ‘infamous’ there is an element that ‘he’ showed them all who he really was in the end.

 

‘He was important and people should have listened’ is another facet to the killer’s demeanour.

 

“One psychotherapist said the closeness of the community may have suffocated the killer to such an extent that he saw no other way out. It can feel very pressurized and too intense and when that happens people do tend to react out of character. They just snap," London-based psychotherapist Lucy Beresford told CNN.

 

"If there is a problem, for example, that might have resulted in them losing face or to be embarrassed in some way, shamed in some way, it can be almost intolerable to deal with when you imagine yourself surrounded by people who know you very well."

 

Many people will demand tightening the gun laws, as they always do when a mass shooting takes place and quite rightly so - something needs to be done.

 

But it can be difficult trying to regulate, who can and who cannot hold a gun license and UK law makers will have a devil of a job working this out.

 

The latest killer had full gun licences.

 

You cannot explore the mental capacity of every gun owner; authorities do not have the resources to make judgements on people who have depression and decide to withdraw their guns until they ‘feel better’.

 

Semi-automatic and pump-action centrefire rifles were banned following the massacre in Hungerford in August 1987. Handguns were outlawed in Britain in 1997 and some 160,000 were surrendered to police. Even Britain's Olympic shooters fall under this ban, meaning the pistol-shooting team must train outside the country.

 

Time will tell with the legal debate; meanwhile the community in Cumbria has been shaken to its very foundations by a man who was ‘one of their own’.

 

Psychotherapist Lucy Beresford added: “Residents who may need most help are the ones who are struggling to cope with the new reality that the idyllic rural retreat is now the scene of multiple murders.

 

"When the kind of serpent in the Eden is exposed some people will need help to come to terms with the reality of that. But, by and large, my faith in human nature would lead me to believe that people, and the community in particular, will be able to recover from this."

 

We all sincerely hope they do. Our thoughts are with the families in Cumbria at this terrible time.