Outside Context

There is much debate regard­ing this on the air­soft for­ums, here is my take:

Women shot dead.  Those are the facts.  The rest is conjecture…the details of the shoot­ing are clearly unknown, but in the past whereas I have always come down on the side of the police, these days I not so inclined. I feel that the police have made some hor­rendous mis­takes and that this is due to too much pres­sure on the fire­arms officers.

Firstly, I dis­agree with shoot­ing to wound. Any shot is only a wound. The FBI have proved in great and gory detail that the Mozam­bi­que drill is the only way to get an oppon­ent to stop, let alone die. Inten­tion­ally shoot­ing to ‘wound’ is actu­ally a colossal waste of time and much more likely to engage a gun fight rather than a take down.

As for the wider report­ing of this event, it is sham: the Metro repor­ted that car­ry­ing an air­soft gun is only legal “with a spe­cial licence”.

The prob­lem is essen­tially due to the defin­i­tions being blurred at the best of times. A BB gun can be an air­soft gun, a G10 metal BB plinker, a suped’up metal BB rat killer, a Stock TM, a cheap springer from the mar­ket, Lex’s pat­riot, or even with a big enough spring: a lethal weapon.

As for the con­ver­sion of BB guns to real fir­ing weapons, well let us not for­get that a .2 BB is the same dia­meter as a .2 bul­let… Intern­als aside, such mis­use is not out­side the realms of pos­sib­il­ity to the insane or crim­in­ally stupid.

It is not for the media to take our side in this debate (that we are com­pletely harm­less sports­men and women) or to take the other side (that we are sur­viv­al­ist WACO style fruit­cakes that like hurt­ing people), but tra­gic­ally; they do take sides. This is because, as far as they are con­cerned, if the police are shoot­ing people car­ry­ing these guns, it must be that they are dan­ger­ous.  Else why are the police nail­ing women in car­parks? Such infer­ences are the sug­ges­tions in the reports (it is equally dam­ming that they parade her mar­tial arts prowess as some sort of char­ac­ter flaw). Should the police reac­tion to every situ­ation involving any sort of gun go from peace to death without being able to pass through any­thing in-between? Where were the tasers? The bean­bag guns? The negotiators?

The press, in my opin­ion, are con­spir­ing to glaze over this policy of death when they imme­di­ately start with an assas­sin­a­tion of their own; going after the women’s character.

I know that most news­pa­pers write for the com­mon man and that people think such a concept is a myth, but it isn’t. The com­mon man is one who is eas­ily riled, quick to judge and bored shittless by life. He watches ‘Enders, smokes tabs, drinks beer to excess, fol­lows foot­ball, loves sen­sa­tion of any kind, etc etc etc. I know buck­ets of people like that. Air­softers are gen­er­ally “fringe” people and in num­bers not that com­mon. Thus we will always be reviled by the news­pa­pers as a minor­ity; some­thing that is always repor­ted as a char­ac­ter flaw above all oth­ers. We are dif­fer­ent, they say, so we must be wrong. Like all good gos­sip and sen­sa­tional report­ing, the num­ber one maxim is “there is no smoke without fire”. “She must have done some­thing…”, is some­thing I have heard many times. The last time was the Brazilian bloke shot on the tube; “He shouldn’t have run from the police… He must have done some­thing, he must have had some­thing to hide…” Yeah, he was late for his fuck­ing train.

In my opin­ion, and fol­low­ing on from Blair’s point in his speech yes­ter­day, the media are guilty and com­pli­cit in the build­ing of an infer­ence without any fac­tual basis. They no longer “report” the news, they now com­ment on the motives. Motives are almost impossible to ascer­tain, but that never stops them from mak­ing them up. And the com­mon man believes them. So all French become frogs, all fam­ous people are spe­cial, all politi­cians are con­spir­ing liars and all people car­ry­ing BB guns are a danger to the chil­dren and must be put down by our trig­ger happy police farce.

Basho

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