A matter of life and death

The news today has been dominated by the shootings in West Cumbria yesterday. I was half listening to a radio report involving a correspondent trying to have his cake and eat it as he described the tasteless insensitivity of the media scrummage for stories while at the same time he was clearly rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in. I don't like the way that horrific incidents like this become so engrossing, creating a feeding frenzy for speculation and eye witness 'exclusives', no matter how tenuous their link to the actual events.

Yet I am also aware that there will be some positive intention to all of this, that as human beings we use stories to make sense or meaning of the extremes of life and death, and some of the accounts that I heard this morning were so shocking in their banal and everyday detail that tabloid hyperbole was unnecessary. People were still struggling to believe what they had seen. They'd assumed the gun was a toy, had struggled to see the gunman as dangerous because he looked so ordinary, so ineffectual. When people fell over and died in front of them they first assumed that the victims were play-acting. I found these accounts chilling because I could understand how unbelievable it would be.

I've not had much experience of guns, but the few that I have seen up close in real life were unprepossessing objects. When I was 13 or 14 I was given a shotgun to hold by a family acquaintance, a gamekeeper. The gun wasn't loaded. He showed me how to hold and aim it, and explained how the kick from it when fired could break shoulders or cheekbones. I wasn't tempted to go further. Many years later, on holiday in Australia, we stayed with friends in a small mining town in the bush. In the corner of a spare bedroom there was a small collection of firearms. They were next to toolboxes, and well-used tools were what they resembled, tubes of dull grey metal with polished and worn wooden handles. The fact that they didn't ooze the glamour that is afforded to guns in films made them more horrific to me. Their owner was a level-headed and personable guy. I enjoyed his company and felt safe with him, and yet I couldn't wait to get away from that house.

Guns are nasty, cowardly, irresponsible objects. They efficiently project pain and death, while allowing their users a choice in terms of how distant and detached they wish to be from the act they are committing. They are also a fact of life. No matter how much I hate them and wish that they did not exist they're still going to be out there. Inevitably, after the horror of yesterday there will be the usual debate about gun laws, responsible gun users will put their case against further regulation, inquiries will look to the character and mental state of the gunman for answers, and we'll learn nothing new. The simple truth about guns is that they are tools for killing, and anybody and everybody who picks one up has the potential to kill. That's the meaning I make of a middle-aged taxi driver with a grudge and a gun license.