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08/31/2005: "Think of the children, part 2"
When I was just a nipper, we used to keep ponies. (That's 'little horses', for you city types). One day, we went to attend to said ponies, & found that the youngest - barely more than a foal - toiling with an airgun pellet embedded in her side. Now ponies are, by definition, small-ish things, & their foals, as you might expect, smallest of all, but they are still far too big to hit by mistake. It seemed to me, and seems still, that some wretched specimen of subhumanity had deliberately shot this inoffensive wee beastie, just for the fun of seeing her suffer.
All of this is just to illustrate that I am no apologist for the loathesome creatures that use air weapons to torment people or animals, usually from a safe distance. But the hysterical responses to the conviction of Mark Bonini, for killing Andrew Morton with an airgun, seem part of an even more worrying trend.
Bonini, for those who have been off-world for the past week, is a degenerate scumbag who derives his kicks from taking pot-shots from his window: neighbours, passers-by, he wasn't unduly selective about his targets. On the occasion that sealed his fate, this noble specimen of h. sapiens was shooting at firefighters. Only he missed his intended target, and hit a 2-year-old wean, penetrating his skull & killing him.
Now no-one is seriously suggesting that Bonini actually meant to kill Andrew, but in Scots law, that doesn't necessarily matter. Our courts recognise a concept of 'wicked recklessness', which means that if you expose someone to a deadly threat while showing a total indifference as to whether they live or die, you are responsible for their deaths. (Before you ask ... no, this doesn't apply to Prime Ministers who order bombs to be dropped on areas with civilian populations, then claim they didn't mean to kill them. Don't be daft.)
Whether it's fair that Bonini receives a life sentence because his recklesslessly fired projectile hit a toddler's head, instead of, say, a fireman's back, is an interesting question; personally, I'm not sure the laws of ballistics should make the difference between a suspended sentence & 13 years in the Bar-L. But that isn't really my point here.
Predictably, given that a child has died, we have seen the growth of a movement to 'dae somethin'. In this case, the somethin in question is a ban on, or tighter regulation of, air weapons. The child's parents are joining this call for an 'Andrew's Law', & the SNP have not been slow to leap aboard the bandwagon.
Given the utter indefensibility of Bonini's actions, & the tragic nature of their consequences, it might sound churlish to oppose such a law. But ever the churl, I intend to do just that. Because we really don't need it. I'm sorry, but the figures just don't support the contention that air weapons are especially deadly. According to ACPOS, there may be as many as half a million airguns in Scotland alone. Yet the total number of airgun fatalities in the whole of the UK is in the region of one a year. This is according to research published in the Journal of Criminal Pathology. (You probably can't see the link without a subscription, but the article is Milroy, et al, 'Air weapon fatalities', J. of Clinical Pathology 1998;51:525-529) And of the five fatalities the researchers found, two were suicides.
So, three non-suicidal deaths within the UK in five years. Despite the fact that, if we extrapolate the ACPOS figures to the whole country, there are about 5 million airguns out there. That, to me, is hardly a cause for panic.
The police don't want airguns to be licensed, for the perfectly intelligent reason that the bureaucracy involved in checking the paperwork for 5 million weapons would take up a lot of time that would be better spent monitoring really dangerous activities, like dangerous driving (about 3500 road deaths a year, since you asked).
Andrew's death was a tragedy. But it was also a freak occurence. And law built around exceptional happenings is rarely law worth making. Legislation borne of emotivism does not make a fitting tribute to dead children.
