This is a picture of Gary Purdham, farmer’s son, Rugby League player and father of two small children. He was murdered, quite without motive, by gun-owner and part-time taxi driver Derrick Bird in Cumbria yesterday. Gary Purdham was helping his uncle carry out the annual hedge-trimming on his farm near Gosforth, when Bird drew up in his taxi and shot him point-blank.
Bird appears to have 'flipped' like other gun-owners and had taken out his simmering paranoid frustration on the innocent community. He felt he could, because he owned and had inherited a stack of rifles and shotguns. In some people possessing a lethal weapon lends them a sense of imperviousness, of hidden power over their seemingly inferior peers.
Like all mass-shootings, the assailant comes to realise exerting power of life or death over strangers is finite and their suicide is a common feature to all firearms massacres. And as usual the weapons were legally owned. The ban on handguns between 1996-8 meant the mass-murderers favoured weapon, the pistol, is no longer easily available and the ammunition is now very hard to come by. So it is a surprise, Bird could murder so many with a shotgun and a .22 rifle.
The law is probably not the best solution here. But independent scrutiny of firearms licensing is long overdue as police seem to simply dish them out to their old mates with little consideration for their mental health. Thomas Hamilton’s licence was approved eventhough the assessment could have not been more explicit in raising potential dangers of letting him have his gun back.
But better policing is no compensation to small boys waking up today to find their Dada still gone. Bird’s acts of evil consign him to the same ignominy as Ryan and Hamilton, fitting testament to other quiet, loners who carried out unspeakable horrors with legal guns.
Bird appears to have 'flipped' like other gun-owners and had taken out his simmering paranoid frustration on the innocent community. He felt he could, because he owned and had inherited a stack of rifles and shotguns. In some people possessing a lethal weapon lends them a sense of imperviousness, of hidden power over their seemingly inferior peers.
Like all mass-shootings, the assailant comes to realise exerting power of life or death over strangers is finite and their suicide is a common feature to all firearms massacres. And as usual the weapons were legally owned. The ban on handguns between 1996-8 meant the mass-murderers favoured weapon, the pistol, is no longer easily available and the ammunition is now very hard to come by. So it is a surprise, Bird could murder so many with a shotgun and a .22 rifle.
The law is probably not the best solution here. But independent scrutiny of firearms licensing is long overdue as police seem to simply dish them out to their old mates with little consideration for their mental health. Thomas Hamilton’s licence was approved eventhough the assessment could have not been more explicit in raising potential dangers of letting him have his gun back.
But better policing is no compensation to small boys waking up today to find their Dada still gone. Bird’s acts of evil consign him to the same ignominy as Ryan and Hamilton, fitting testament to other quiet, loners who carried out unspeakable horrors with legal guns.
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