The mother of 11-year-old Rhys Jones cradled her dying son in her arms after he was shot on the streets of Liverpool last night by a youth who rode past on a BMX bike.
Rhys, an Everton fan, had just finished football training and was kicking a ball around with friends in the car park of the Fir Tree pub in Croxteth, when he was gunned down.
Merseyside police has launched one of its biggest murder investigations, drafting in 300 police officers to catch those involved in the killing that has shocked a community hardened to gun crime in recent years. Two youths aged 14 and 18 were being questioned today after being arrested on suspicion of murder.
Detectives have appealed to the criminal community to “examine their conscience” and help.
What a terrible loss. What is left but to grieve. I pray the UK police seek justice.
I am sure that this piece is posted here because of the larger questions it raises. One of those questions is how can a random street shooting happen in a country where guns are illegal? Is this a common crime (gun violence) in Liverpool?
If you nsmuggle illegal drugs into the UK, you can smuggle firearms illegal in the UK into the UK.
Wow. I’m shocked that criminals didn’t obey Britain’s gun-control laws.
In the 1950s, when I was a child in the UK before my family emigrated to the US, I remember that in the case of an unusally violent crime, particularly a crime with a weapon, the police regularly appealled to the *criminal community* for them to help turn in the perp.
Often, quite often in fact, this happened and a member of the criminal community dropped a dime on the perp and the police were able to quite quickly nab them.
It was always told to me that the villains did that, as they were not armed and they did not want to see the police being armed. It made a great deal of sense then. It still does.
I wonder though, if British society has been so badly warped and changed now, that such an appeal will still work? I hope that it does this bike-by shooting indicates to me, a terrible change in the common society. Weapons are now available to juviniles and they are using them for their own warped reasons.
As the government has ensured that all the law-abiding citizens are now disarmed, then the population has been effectively made into victims waiting to be slaughtered.
Exactly what I wonder, since the forced disarming of law abiding UK citizens, are the crime rate statistics in the UK, over the last 5 years, with regard to the rates of:
1) Armed Robbery,
2) Armed Breaking & Entry/Burglary/Home Invasion,
3) Murder by firearm.
A dis-armed population are subjects,
An armed population, are citizens.
I’ve read that two teens have been detained for questioning in this sad case. Apparently, it is illegal to defend yourself in Britain. No one is allowed to own a gun. If someone breaks into you house to rob you and you defend yourself with whatever you can manage to use as a weapon, then you are subject to prosecution and if you injure the intruder, he can sue you. No wonder the crime rate is climbing. I’ve also read that police forces are being cut back and many rural village police stations have been closed.
What a mess.
Experience tells me that there isn’t any point into trying to bring facts into the debate about firearms and whether people in the UK are safer than in the USA. Friends in the USA seem convinced that:
a) people in the UK are far more likely to suffer violence than their well-armed cousins in the USA, and
b) the UK’s gun laws do not work because some criminals get hold of firearms.
As for b) – of course it happens that some types of criminal get hold of them and use them. But our current gun laws were brought in after public revulsion at the Dunblane massacre of primary school children in 1996. Their real intention was not do disarm all criminals but to make it more difficult for people with an unhealthy interest in guns to get hold of them. If you compare the UK’s and the USA’s record on gun rampages since 1996 I think you can judge whether the law is working.
As for a) – don’t just get your impressions from one or two dreadful events. The BBC News website has a useful article on this, which says, in part:
[blockquote] According to provisional Home Office figures, there were 58 firearms-related homicides in 2006-07 compared with 49 in the previous year. That is an increase of 18% in just one year. If we include airguns, the number of homicides in 2006-07 rises to 61. There were 413 firearms incidents that resulted in serious injury – more than one a day.
But at the same time, the trend in gun crime overall has been going down.
Overall firearms offences fell 13% in 2006-07 to 9,608 incidents – the lowest number in seven years. Firearms robberies, handgun offences and serious injuries from firearms are also down. [/blockquote]
That figure of 58 homicides compares with 10,100 in the USA (latest FBI figures I can find). Even allowing for a population five times the UK’s, that’s a pretty big difference.
And for Scotreb, the figures you want are all on the Home Office site at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/17_07_07_crime.pdf
But I have no hope whatsoever of changing anyone’s minds with facts. People will still tell me that citizens of the USA are far safer because of their massive gun ownership – and the fact that an American resident is thirty-three times more likely to be shot dead in the course of a year than a UK subject just shows how vulnerable the British are – somehow!
I guess it was too good to last, but I remember how wonderful it was traveling in Britain in 1986 and not seeing cops with guns strapped to their hips, walking out in the evenings without fear and not reading in every morning paper about the shootings from the night before. It was an unpleasant jolt of culture shock to come home and see the policemen in the airport all wearing guns.
The men in my family have all always owned guns and I have to admit to at least twice in my life when I felt more secure because of that. But never have I felt as free or secure as I did on that trip to England and Scotland.
As contrasted with my shock when I first went to Europe at the cops mostly had machine guns. This was Italy in 1995, and it seemed that there was a cop with a submachinegun or a conscript with an assault rifle on every corner. Had one aimed at my chest when my friend was slow opening her backpack at the airport.
#6 — I agree with you. The murder rate is quite low in England, which is why this case is particularly shocking to them. I have always felt very safe in London and other cities — even on the Tube. Whereas in NYC, I’ve always had to be hyper-vigilant, especially on the Subway.
How does arming the citizenry make any sense? It just assures easy access to weapons for all and heightens the risk of “crimes of passion.” I don’t think that most murders here in the States are pre-meditated. They’re the result of weapons on hand that someone decides to use in a fit of rage. One of my cousins is in prison for this very thing! He was drunk, someone kept taunting him in a bar, and he shot the man. Bob wasn’t normally a violent person and didn’t have any sort of criminal record. It was a matter of him being in a bad mood because of personal problems, adding alcohol, and then an equally drunk individual who mocked him. Oh, yes, and a gun on hand.
I shudder to think about Britain’s crime rate if all of the “football rowdies” had easy access to weapons!