On Raoul Moat

Anyone looking at any of the British news outlets today will probably clock that the story of the meathead gunman Raoul Moat has ended. And it has ended in a deeply predictable way; like many of his monstrous ilk, Moat has not died in a hail of bullets fired by his pursuers, but rather by a self-inflicted gun wound and in a miasma of self-pity.

This part of the BBC news report made me raise my eyebrows though:

A guest-house owner, who did not want to be named, told the BBC: "He actually said, the one thing that sticks in my mind, 'I haven't got a dad'... and he also said that, 'nobody cares about me'."

Clearly Moat hasn't been catching up with the news - the downside, no doubt, to being on the run in a forest - because as far as I can see many people have cared about him this week. Every news outlet has been running multiple stories - about the hunt, about Moat as a person, and about what might have caused his attempted killing spree. Sure, people might not have cared that much about Moat's well-being, but every media outlet in the country did at least seem to care about what was happening.

And for the life of me I struggle to understand why. After all, the constant reports of the hunt for Moat are hardly the most fascinating of stories (we don't where he is, we don't know where he is, still no idea where he is, nope - no news on where he is, police have found him, he's dead). And it isn't really in the national interest either; the only reasons why anyone should have been concerned about Moat's shooty tendencies was if they happened to be a police officer in the Newcastle area or a resident in Rothbury. Otherwise, you were always going to be pretty safe from Moat. Furthermore, for a gunman on the run, Moat was mercifully poor at killing people - he tried three times and only succeeded once. The one successful slaying is a tragedy for the man's friends and family, but compared to the actions of others who go out killing with a gun, Moat's 33% success rate was pretty inept.

So why all the attention on this figure? His handsome good looks? I think we can dismiss that. No, I do believe that the only reason why our media spent so much time on this story is because they believed people wanted to hear about it. Which is utterly depressing. What does it say about a country that they want to revel in the hunt for a lethal, failed human being? Why do we want endless speculation about his motives? Why do we want graphic footage of the aftermath of one of his attacks? Are we really so base and so prurient that we have to see the video on the BBC website of this oaf's death?

The sad thing is that for a lot of the British population, the answer to that last question is "yes". Because while there is something innately brilliant about human potential, there is also a baser, darker side to the way we interact with each other. There is a sense in which we want to revel in the misfortune of others, and smugly note from relative safety that "there but for the grace of God go I". We also want to hear about the monsters - we want to hear about their monstrous acts, and like the reassurance when they've been caught and/or killed. And we want to smugly feel that we are better than the likes of Moat. Whatever our flaws, we're not as bad as this particular man.

To some extent, this tendency has always existed in humanity; it's just with the 24/7 news cycle the tendency becomes impossible to miss. What we've seen over the past week is the tendency of some people to rubber-neck at a car accident magnified on a national scale. It happens; to deny it is to be very naive. But that doesn't make this truth any easier to swallow, and if you're anything like me you'll end up feeling depressed not only that the likes of Moat exist, but also about the way many people respond to something like Moat's killings and the subsequent hunt for him.