‘THERE’S GOING to be a rampage in this town tomorrow.” Derrick Bird had warned friends and colleagues as much on Tuesday night. He told one: “You won’t see me again”. They laughed at him. The way you would. “Derrick wouldn’t usually say boo to a goose,” a friend told journalists. And even with the benefit of hindsight, the knowledge of Cumbria’s 13 dead, it is difficult to imagine anyone doing anything any differently.
The instinctive “if only I’d ...” reaction, the knee-jerk desire to blame someone else, to hold someone other than a clearly disturbed man accountable, are futile, if inevitable. Some events simply do not have a deeper meaning beyond the reality that “bad things happen”. That is what we mean by “senseless”.
Fortunately such random explosions of violence happen rarely in these islands. Apart from politically inspired atrocities, hopefully a thing of the past, the carnage that Bird wrought in his “rampage” is only really a once-in-a-decade phenomeon. In 1987 in Hungerford, Berkshire, unemployed labourer and antiques dealer Michael Ryan killed 14, including his mother, before taking his own life. In Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 former scout leader Thomas Hamilton burst into a school gym and killed 16 five- and six-year-olds.
Inevitably, however, the issue of gun licensing will again come to be the focus of public debate. There are still some 1.3 million legally held shotguns in Britain (22,476 in Cumbria alone), as well as, separately licensed, 435,000 rifles and high powered airguns.
Yet the country has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. In 1988, in response to Hungerford, the ownership of automatic weapons was banned and the availability of shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two rounds was restricted. The year after Dunblane the government banned most of the remaining handguns in England, Scotland and Wales, leaving only some historic and sporting handguns legal.
Overall, deaths by shooting have fallen from a high of 97 in 2001/’02 to 39 in 2008/’09, a stark contrast to a typical US annual figure of 30,896 (2006).
Bird had held his shotgun licences for 15 years, and that for the rifle since 2007. This was possible because his conviction for theft in the 1990s did not involve a custodial sentence. And, while there have been questions raised about police laxity over the home visits that are supposed to accompany licence renewal applications, there has been no suggestion that anything in Bird’s behaviour might have indicated to friends or the police that he was not a fit person to hold the licences. Short of banning firearms it is difficult to see how someone like him could be prevented from holding guns.
The rarity of events like Tuesday’s tragedy will be of little consolation to the shocked people of this stretch of idyllic Cumbrian coastline bordering the Lake District. This is a quiet place of stunning lakes, mountain walks and landscapes that attracts up to 14 million tourists every year. Tiny, close-knit rural communities have been traumatised by three hours of random savagery and they will take a long time healing. Our hearts go out to them.