Friday 7 August 2015

Bang bang bang, you're dead.



 The Dutch army is so short of bullets that soldiers in training have to point unloaded guns and go 'bang bang' bang'. They should come to Britain where we, too, seem to have a problem in understanding the reality of violence.

John 'Goldfinger' Palmer, a well known gangster, was shot in the chest six times and the police accepted the paramedics assurance he'd suffered a heart-attack. This may sound unlikely, even unbelievable, but then again society seems increasingly confused as to what constitutes violence. The police, too, so it seems.

A child brushed with a stinging nettle and a man hit by a biscuit have both been recorded by police as violent crimes, acting under new, stricter Home Office rules. Another incident in which a child was caught by a boxing glove being swung about by a younger brother was recorded by Norfolk police as an assault occasioning actual bodily harm.  

The biscuit incident involved a woman throwing said comestible at a man and causing a small red mark. In another case involving two children, police recorded an assault after one of them rode into his friend while they were doing 'wheelies' on their bikes. Similar lunacy involved a woman charged with assault for slapping her three year old son's hand after she caught him stealing a bar of chocolate from a shop.

 I don't know who was most stupid, the police or the member of the public who recorded it. In this context the delay in diagnosing what actually killed John Goldfinger Palmer becomes almost understandable.

4 comments:

Maria Zannini said...

This shouldn't surprise me, yet it still does.

It's the same here. I remember a story where the police were called in on a kindergarten child who pretended his hand was a gun, pointing it at imaginary villains.

People have no common sense. I'm glad at least I had a normal childhood.

Anonymous said...

At every opportunity, the state demonstrate their perfect incompetence to define ethical behavior.

Mike Keyton said...

Maria,
I've been remiss - holiday chaos. You're right though, it's strange world we live in and bound to get stranger. I'm sure a C4th Roman felt much the same way.

Mike Keyton said...

Crash despite all the warnings of the overpowerful state, its power and incompetence grows. The purpose of bureacracy is bureacracy