Why Dont You Blog?

It’s almost a truism that anyone who makes a tear-stained televised appeal for help to solve a murder will probably be arrested within the week. It seems as if the more extravagant the grief that is willingly expressed on camera, the more likely that the person is guilty.

Even the BBC has noticed. Today it published a feature on the phenomenon .

And, now, I’ve stumbled across true-crime-in-the-media. 2.0:
Barbora Skrlova on MySpace Assuming this is an elaborate joke, albeit in poor taste, I am compelled to look for MySpace profiles of other notorious figures.

For instance, Myra Hindley seems to have half a dozen.

I type in Fred West and get a “Server is too busy” message a few times.
(Quick break to panic at the idea that half the global population has been taken with a lunatic desire to see which really evil people have a MySpace profile.) Then I find there’s an ill-starred 13 pages full of Fred Wests. Lose interest when I consider that most of them might indeed be real humans who just happen to be called Fred West. Then again, a fair number have headlines such as “Get a load of my floorboards”

On firmer ground with Rosemary West. After a good few innocently but unluckily named real US females who just happen to be called Rosemary West, I find a MySpace profile purporting to be from Fred West’s soulmate. In fact, there’s a link to a more convincing Fred West impersonator in her friend space..

What about Josef Fritzl? That one is actually quite scary. I can’t even work out if its meant to reference the Austrian maniac or the name is just a coincidence.

Michel Fourniret? The server times out. Then I get a
“We weren’t able to find a ” Michel Fourniret ” on MySpace”
message, which probably won’t be true for long.

(In case this name isn’t familiar to you, he’s the male half of a French version of a Rosemary-and-Fred-West couple. She lured young women for him to rape and murder, in exchange for his promise to murder her ex-husband. The family that slays together, stays together…….)

I can partly understand why sane people might create web pages for the truly evil. (Apart from an adolescent desire to shock people.) These sorts of crimes make most of us so uneasy about the nature of what it means to be human that humour becomes a necessary defence mechanism. Otherwise, it’s impossible to contemplate the things they have done.

All the same, I have to suspect that at least some of these tributes aren’t ironically post-modern comments on the nature of notoriety. Some of them have been put there by the very same sort of unspeakable beings who do such crimes.

It’s usually baffling how these spectacularly homicidal people find each other to begin these partnerships in crime.. Rosemary and Fred West; Michel and Monique Fourniret, the children who killed James Bulger; Myra Hindley and Ian Brady…… Do their eyes meet across the proverbial crowded room and they see the spark of a potential partner in homicide? Does it “take one to know one?”

Blimey, interactive web 2.0 must do away with so much of the uncertainty for such people. They could start by putting up profiles of their psycho role models …

Grrr. Yet another offensively-misnamed “honour killing” “Honour” is apparently being redefined in some bizarre medieval way to mean how totally you can control your female relatives. As far as I can see, this is not just dishonour at its extreme.

It also speaks of men who are so completely lacking in a sense of their own masculinity that they can only fake it by killiing females they can’t control. I hate to refer to the currently- dishonoured Freud here, but some things don’t seem to be explicable otherwise.

A 20-year-old woman was killed by her male relatives for “dishonouring” them. (Her body was dumped in a suitcaes over a hundred miles away, just in case you mistakenly imagine there were any shreds of residual kinship feeling in the relatives who did this). Three people (including her father and uncle) have been found or pled guilty.

The police seem to have treated this case with a level of seriousness somewhat lower than that with which they are now supposed to treat kids playing football in the street. (Her father had already tried to kill her once before. Her sister was also beaten.)

Banaz had made several attempts to warn police that her life was in danger, even naming those she thought would kill her.

The BBC site links to the Forced Marriages Unit. You might assume this is a policing unit designed to stop British women being subjected to this sort of evil. Wrong. It’s just yet another anti-immigration department of the Foreign Office, as far as I can see.

(Its website just discusses how a “forced marriage” is not the same as an “arranged marriage.” It has a few case studies and discusses how difficult they can be for consular staff. it seems to offer no redress or solutions, other than the possible extrapolation that the person whose immigration benefit the forced marriage is for won’t get a visa. I would have thought that that is of no interest to anyone except the Foreign Office.)

I can’t see how this is relevant to this case or any use in protecting victims. If this weakest link is the best the BBC can find, it implies there is no dedicated police unit or section of the Home Office. Most honour killings and other culturally excused atrocities such as female genital mutilation have little to do with immigration.

The only policies with any chance of working would involve:

(1) Police treating such cases as a serious priority, so that any man or woman facing a such situation, who has the strength of will to seek help for themselves or other people gets it as a priority.

(2) Aggressive targeting of potential victims through the education system and mosques and temples and churches, if necessary. All girls should be made aware that forced marriage and any of the other associated anti-female horrors are serious crimes in the UK. And the law will be enforced as a priority.

(3) Girls and women under threat need agencies prepared to protect them and to provide them with the means of escape.

(3) Aggressive targetting of potential perpetrators through the education system and mosques and temples and churches, if necessary. Everyone should be made aware that forced marriage and any of the other horrors are serious crimes in the UK. And the law will be enforced as a priority.

[tags]bbc, disgrace, homicide, honor, honor-killing, honour, honour-killing, law, law-and-order, sexism, society, culture, religion, belief[/tags]

Fights with kicks rather than punches are very much more likely to lead to serious injury or death, according to a pathologist I heard on TV the other day but can’t find a reference for. (Thank you, Google….) Anyway, with or without scholarly support, simple logic suggests that most of us can kick much harder than we can punch, because a kick engages the whole bodyweight. If you kick someone or stamp on them, there is a good chance you will kill them.

So, even in unarmed combat, the feet are deadlier weapons than the hands. The likelihood of death depends on the power of the weapon. To take up on points in the guns-and-crime blog, fights in which feet are used will be deadlier than those in which punches are traded. Where the protaganists have knives or guns, there is always more chance of death or serious injury.

So, the often-expressed argument that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” falls down here. For a given level of aggression, the chance of death rises the easier the access to deadly weapons.

This isn’t the whole issue, of course. Every Swiss citizen is required to hold a gun. I doubt if the Swiss murder rate is even equal to the UK’s, let alone the USA’s. (Except, obviously, the murder rate in the English village, Midsomer Norton, which must put Baltimore in the shade) Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the USA (genuine thanks to Wikipedia ) but lower rates of non-fatal violent crime than the next highest contender in the murder sweepstakes, which is Detroit.

With no local knowledge of US cities- beyond what’s provided by the supreme TV show The Wire, of course – this is just speculation. Maybe guns are just easier to get hold of in Baltimore than Detroit? So any crime is more likely to end in a death?

There has got to be more to it, of course, given the Swiss example of a country with lots of guns and few murders. Social and cultural factors can provide an explanation. The social divisions in American cities are huge,. They are made more painful for those at the bottom of the racie and class heap by a context of values that regard those without money as worthless.

It’s common for ministers (BBC ) to blame hiphop music for the spread of gun crime in England. The glorification of guns and money in gangsta rap lyrics is indeed often ugly. However, it reflects values common in American society. These may be attractive to young men around the world who feel unmanned by the options open to them. However, it isn’t likely to influence fulfilled and optimistic young men, beyond a fantasy level. This is like blaming heavy metal bands for teenage suicides.

And in any case, it comes back to the avilability of guns. There are always dangerous and violent people. If you have the misfortune to come up against them, you had better hope they don’t have guns. (And that they don’t know about the feet thing either.)

At the risk of turning this into a new topic which is hounded to death on the blog, I found some more interesting comments about carrying guns in public – nothing new, they are just more recent ones on the More Guns, More Homicide post.

Previously I pointed out that, as a Brit, I found it odd that the desire to carry a gun while you go about your daily life is so strong in some Americans and that oddness remains. I still find it strange beyond belief that some one in a civilised western democracy can feel so “unsafe” they need to be armed when ever they are in public.

Now, this self defence argument for “packing heat” makes me wonder a bit more. For example, on the comments “ben” was asked the following question by SG (read original):

let me get this right Ben. Someone walks up to you in the street and sticks a knife in your face, says “gimme your wallet”, and you think you can draw your gun and threaten and/or shoot them before they stab you? Is this how the self-defence argument works? Or does it work by you pulling your gun before they pull the knife, i.e. shooting them if they look threatening?

While this seems like a reasonable method of explaining the self defence argument for carrying a gun the responses it drew included this from MarkP (”I’m an actuary, I own a gun but don’t carry it, and have no particular love for them”) (read original)

No, SG, he thinks if he pulls his gun, the knifewielder will see the gun and will flee. And he is substantially correct. People wield weapons mostly for bluff. If the knifewielder had wanted to just have a fight, he would have stabbed Ben without asking for the wallet.

The only thing funnier than paranoid gun nuts protecting their phallic symbols are gun-phobes revealing that they cannot think logically about guns for one second, and know nothing about the real world. I suggest this be alleviated by talking about “weapons” rather than guns, since guns are only the most effective weapons at killing, but certainly not the only ones. Just ask the people in Rwanda.

While on the surface this seems like a logical line of reasoning, it suffers from a logical fallacy, having said that his attempt to broaden the debate is worthwhile, but I suspect it is futile.

Now as I see it the fallacy is that he is assuming the gun wielder is not bluffing but the robber is. If the statement “people wield weapons mostly for bluff” is true, then it must also apply to the gun owner and therefore drawing the weapon does not carry any reason to assume the robber will run.
When the gun is drawn the situation escalates. The robber will suffer from an adrenaline rush and may well decide that running will result in being shot in the back and attacking the gun owner is the only option. On a purely technical point, if the knife wielder is close enough to be a real threat anyway, the hand gun is probably useless unless it is already drawn.

There is more though. Ben replied to the question with: (read original)

It works like this: If I thought my life was in danger, then I’d draw and shoot if necessary. If not, then he can have my wallet, car and any other inanimate object he likes.

It is an interesting conundrum he presents. Some one is threatening you with a knife and you may not consider your life was in danger? If there is no threat, he will surrender his objects but if there is a threat he will try to fight. Very unusual and difficult to imagine how it can work in practice.

There are a multitude of arguments for, and against, gun ownership. My personal thoughts about the escalation of violence may well suffer from the slippery slope fallacy but I doubt it. When one person is armed and the other isn’t deaths may occur. If both are armed deaths may still occur and may well be more likely. Is the belief the death may not be the victim sufficient grounds for people to carry guns? Would you rather be punched or shot as the result of an argument with another car driver? Would you carry a gun in case the other driver came up to you and started shouting? At what point would you draw the gun?

As soldiers are taught, once the weapon is brought into view the whole situation changes. If your opponent does not back down immediately you pretty much have to kill them. The more people carry guns, the more likely an otherwise heated situation will turn violent. Is this grounds for banning firearms in the US? I don’t think so, but then I don’t live there.

Now, it seems I was a touch hasty with my last post on gun crime and statistics. If I had spent more time reading the comments on the Deltoid post even more comedy bad-statistical goodness would have come to light.

As someone living outside the US, I have no real concept of how this is an issue which creates such a furore. I am dimly aware of the constitutional issues, but as far as I can tell the right to bear arms was there because the founding fathers didn’t believe in a standing army. I don’t think they envisaged a future where both would happen, but who am I to know.

The main pro-gun comments seem to come from a guy called “ben” who proudly proclaims “I pack heat” and while superficially sound, they don’t seem to survive detailed analysis. For example, the numerous studies which have linked gun ownership to homicide are disproven by a the apparent fact that the homicide rate in gun-carrying Seattle is lower than in gun-banned Vancouver. Interesting. I think it is important to highlight that the debate is about “homicide” not “gun crime” which is a mistake I have made in the past.

While it is entirely possible that the apparently obvious more guns = more crime assumption is wrong, this leads to more questions which could have interesting conclusions. If more guns != more crime, then why does the nation with the highest incidence of gun ownership have more crimes per person than other nations? Are God-fearing Americans simply more criminally minded than (say) Canadians?