The Cumbrian Murders

It is difficult to know what to say about the Cumbrian shootings. Such an appalling and senseless waste of human life - and those lives being taken in an arbitrary, pointless way as if to make it even worse - always provokes a response. And, sadly, that response is not limited to just those who want to offer condolences. Such brutal massacres become a way in which people can make their political points, and get into their pulpits and try to make everything alright again.

And you can see this happening in the aftermath of Bird's rampage. Some people want to ban shotguns, others want to prevent knee-jerk responses to the shooting, some want the death penalty restoring. But all miss the point that this story, at this point, should not about scoring political points. It should be about acknowledging the grief of those who have lost someone. Those who have a friend or a family member who won't ever be coming home again.

But that won't stop people making themselves and their opinions heard, and to some extent it is perfectly natural to want to do something in the aftermath of something like this. Opinions and strident calls for action represent a chance to reimpose order. But it is also pointless. Utterly pointless.

These things are arbitrary. They happen apparently at random. There's a man (and it does tend to be a man) who appears to be normal. Suddenly, that man is shooting. And by the time the emergency services start to realise what is going on, the perpetrator tends to be dead. They tend to have taken their own life. The span of the killing spree might be several hours, which sounds like a long time. But in reality, it is next to no time at all. The person starts to kill, they kill, then they are gone. The emergency services are only just starting to understand that there is something going on by the time that person is no more.

The death penalty is an irrelevance - as I mentioned, spree killers tend to kill themselves. Don't believe me? Think about Ryan. Hamilton. And now Bird. And while some American spree killers have gone down (for want of a better word) fighting, more recent examples show that suicide is increasingly the way in which these things end. And besides, America has had the death penalty for ages. It hasn't stopped people going on the rampage.

Those who argue that we should ban different types of firearms have more of a case. After all, those who go on the rampage with a knife tend to have fewer victims that those with a loaded gun. If they indulge in a spree killing, as opposed to a series of killings, that is. But ban the guns and you won't stop the youths with bombs strapped to their backs.

The reality - the terrifying reality that people struggle with, particularly after something like the Cumbrian spree - is that you can't stop the killers. There is something within humans that allows certain humans to commit crimes that shock the rest of the world. On a micro level, you have Derek Bird. On a macro level, you have Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and those who turned Rwanda in 1994 into a bloodstained killing field. One of the defining characteristics of humanity is the ability of some humans to be utterly inhuman to other humans. It is a terrifying thought - it is a terrifying reality - but for all the protests and platitudes that occur after this sort of thing has happened, nothing can change that this sort of thing is rare, yet seemingly inevitable.

So go on - argue your gun control, debate the death penalty. You won't stop humans being human - for better or, in the case of the horror in Cumbria, for worse.