Daily Archives: Wed, 31 October, 2007

Safe as milk?

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First T_W, now me. We are becoming Simon Jenkins groupies. Oh blast. But he had a pretty good rant about the pervasiveness of surveillance and the growing spread of government intrusion into private life, in the Times Online today.

The really odd, semi-coherent nutters were out in force though. One comment that is daft enough to repeat said.

We seem to be ruled by the health and safety commission and supernanny combined

I can see that creeping centralisation of data combined with more surveillance and laws to stop us drinking and smoking and so on get tangled together in people’s minds. But the “health and safety” stuff that people tend to tie into this is a different matter altogether.

As far as I know, the Health and Safety Commission has no responsibilities beyond trying to cut down the numbers of people killed or seriously injured at work, and even these responsibilities only apply to specific kinds of work. If you get electrocuted in your office or you are sold bread with glass in it – it has nothing to do with them. They have nothing whatsoever to do with advising the population of Harrogate how much they should drink.

(Apparently, in Harrogate, “26.4% of you had between 12 and 17 “large” glasses of wine” last week, according to Simon Jenkins)

The current hysteria about health and safety has nothing to do with new laws or more intensive health and safety law enforcement – which is becoming close to non-existent. It is the result of the current response to any injury, which is to bang in a “No-win, no-fee” compensation claim.

(I speak as someone who heard the name of the Health and Safety Commission taken in vain yet again by my gym, when the staff threw me out – again – for not bringing an approved form of training shoes, last week This was despite – OK, then, maybe because of – my sarcastically pointing out that I didn’t know that it was possible to get steel-toe-capped trainers …. Oh alright then, maybe it was the (I thought mild, almost sub-vocal) cussing that got to them….

But it’s so much easier to blame imaginary health and safety inspectors, who might take it into their heads to visit my gym, bizarrely exceeding their legal remit, and then decide to enforce the wearing of cloth training shoes over open-toed hiking sandals.

No really, this is going somewhere, I think…. Our “safety” has indeed become an excuse for any number of ludicrous minor annoyances, like getting Marmite confiscated on a plane, as well as major intrusions on civil liberty. Actually examining the detail of whether any of these things really make us “safer” is, to put it mildly, long overdue.

Gun Crime, Family and Confusion

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A while ago (2 Oct 07 to be precise), I wrote a post about how the weird idea people have that being armed is a “good thing” (for whatever reason) had led to the death of a young girl and the destruction of a family – she was killed by her brother, playing with his mother’s illegally owned revolver. (Post was titled “One Bullet Destroys Three Lives.”)

Today I have a comment from someone calling themselves Logic. Although I want to respond to the comment, I can’t really do it justice by simply responding with a comment, so I thought I would repost the comment and address it here. Here we go.

does any one know what a .38 revolver looks like,…. i do, and if you dont then a quick search on the net will show you pictures,

Its ok, I know what a .38 revolver looks like. You may be thinking they all look the same, but they don’t. There are similarities, however if you do not know what you are looking for it is easy to make mistakes.

OTs-38 silent revolver (Russia) Five-shot .38-calibre revolver

the POINT is ,,,.. Kasha Peniston (the brother) must of knew it was loaded as you can SEE the bullets, he should of got more then 2yrs he should of got 5years in time, no less,

You are assuming a few things here. First off, if it was a .38 special style revolver (the one on the right above), then yes it is possible to see the brass ends of the rounds in the cylinder. However, this assumes the person knows enough to look. If the brother was, as claimed, simply playing with this as a toy, then it is unlikely he thought enough to check the cylinder to see if there were bullets in place. Even trained people make mistakes about the state of a weapon, so it is a bit comical to assume a teenager will be thoughtful and thorough enough to carry out normal safety precautions.

Secondly, what difference would the extra 3 years on his sentence have made? I suspect you have picked a completely arbitrary sentence and decided that would be more suitable. His family is destroyed. 5 years or 50 years is not going to change that. If we accept the courts findings that this crime was not malicious, then what are you seeking to punish here?

Sad, and traumatic, that this event might be, the boy still basically had an accident while playing. Because his mother (for whatever reason) had a loaded weapon in the house, the accident didn’t result in something trivial like a cut arm but the death of his sister. Punishing the boy will not deter this from happening again. His life is already destroyed, so why add to the suffering?

he’ll do 1yr and get out on bing the idol inmate, (aka good boy) either way he will be out by age 19,

So what? Are you saying that rewarding inmates who show good behaviour with reduced sentences is a bad thing? What do you think the purpose of prison is? If, as I thought, Prison is there to rehabilitate offenders then rewarding good behaviour is the right thing to do.

Also, why do you have a problem with him getting out by the age of 19? Would you rather he spent longer in jail, became a hardened criminal and then spent what remains of his life damaging society?

and the sotry reads ….the mother went to london for the weekend etc etc, and told the Boy where the gun was,.. he inturn got the gun and MUST of knew it was loaded but still played around with it,

Again, so what? The case reporting never disputed that the boy was playing with the weapon. He admitted to shooting his sister. You are basing all this on the assumption the boy had looked to see if the weapon was loaded.

Now the mother is trying to pin it on the so called bad boy image boy friend,

Once more, this cries out “so what?” In the original post, I was pointing out the flaw in the idea that people being armed / carrying weapons at home made things safer. I highlighted this was a situation which had totally stemmed from the mothers insane idea that having a gun in the house was sensible.

I am, totally, at a loss as to the point you are trying to make here.

this blog is a load of sh!t,.. if your going to tell the story tell it how it is.,,.. not bits a bats,

Well, thanks for taking the time to comment when you have such a low opinion of the blog. What part of the story do you feel was missed out? The post you have commented on was not a “news report,” it was an analysis of how the tragedy had come about, especially in light of recent jingoistic claims by various politicians.

and if you block the comment,. atleast u know ur talkin crap

Great. I didn’t block it. As you can see, I rarely talk crap and this certainly wasn’t one of those times. In a similar vein of human charity, I will point out that I suspect you are simply doing a drive by trolling. If you don’t come back and elaborate, at least you know you are talking crap.