February 15, 2005
Creepy, perverted and weird
The following article, by Carol Sarler, appeared in the Daily Express on the 18th of July 2001. It was an epiphany for me.
I have always considered myself an essentially nice person. Obviously whether you are nice or not is best defined by others around you but all indications are that I am probably right.
When I read the following Sarler article, and in particular the second from last paragraph, I could not believe my eyes. There was this person that I had never met, and who had never met me, in a position of some considerable responsibility and, dare I say it, power, calling me creepy, perverted and weird. She could never wish me happiness in my life and doubted my very soul.
I did not see a single article in the mainstream media coming to my defence. Not a peep. I was one member of a persecuted minority (and yes, we were being beaten up pretty badly back then, metaphorically speaking) and we were a minority that was effectively alone. Powerless, weak and utterly reliant on the tolerance of the majority and we were left to fend for ourselves in the face of mainstream media onslaughts such as that written in the article below.
Prejudice ruled and we were crucified.
Two of my faiths took broadsides. Firstly my effective belief that the mainstream media were essentially truthful. I was naïve, I know, but I really didn’t appreciate it for the spin fest that it was and is. Secondly, democracy lost some of its lustre.
Here is the article in full.
Article by Carol Sarler - Daily Express 18 July 2001If you can read that article and nod, agree and generally wonder what all my fuss is about then you are one kind of person. If you can read it for the disgrace that it surely is then you are my kind of person."OUR OLD friends from the Countryside Alliance stuck their pointy heads out of their burrow on Monday, pleased as a stirrup cup of punch with their latest wheeze for yet more killing.
According to a report that they paid good money to commission, the criminal use of handguns rose by 40 per cent during the two years after they were banned in response to Thomas Hamilton's massacre of 16 children at Dunblane. Therefore, reasons the Alliance, the ban should be reversed.
Yes, I know: it takes a moment. More guns in more crimes, so let's have...more guns. This is the selfish nonsense of the spoilt brat. "Me, me, me," it cries, "I'm not Hamilton. I'm safe with a gun. And anyway, he didn't kill the kiddies because guns were available to him, he killed them because he was mad."
It never occurs to them that if guns had not been available to him, he couldn't have killed anyone, even if he'd been mad as a skunk. But logic is never a great imperative to such people; their focus here, as it is with their passion for fox.hunting, is on the rights of the hoorays to enjoy what they like to call "sport". So their thinking goes that if a ban isn't working as well as it might be, instead of trying a bit harder with it we should revoke it altogether to allow those who care to do so to get back to their beloved shooting matches.
I dearly hope that our legislature doesn't take a blind bit of notice. Partly because - and we know this from the experience of the whole wide world -more guns mean more deaths and a couple of years or the odd report makes not a jot of difference to that fact.
But I stand agin partly for another reason. I once wrote on this page that my opposition to fox.hunting is based on a visceral feeling that people who take pleasure in it are precisely the kinds of people I do not wish to have pleasure. And so with guns and so with the people who, similarly; take pleasure in them.
There is something quite particular about a gun. Almost any other weapon you can think of has the potential for good; an axe wood for warmth, a machete hacks bamboo for shelter, dynamite builds dams for water, knives cut vegetables for food and, in a surgeon's careful hand, can actually save life. Even the man who split the atom was working towards an ultimate good he believed in.
Guns, by contrast, have only one function. Whether lifted in attack or defence, whether aimed at an endangered ibis in Africa, a tortured schizophrenic in Liverpool or a silly sod with a boy-wonder cigarette lighter in Brixton, the goal is the same: to rip bullets through flesh, to wound or to kill. In times of war, with awe and respect and reluctance, our trained soldiers may need to load and fire their guns but in times of peace, what do we say of those who find them a source of entertainment? Those who will stroke and clean and polish, who will devote their precious time and energy and even their love to such uncompromising apparatus of destruction?
I say that they are, to the last man woman among them, creepy, perverted and weird. They could not be friends of mine, doubting their souls as I do, and I could not wish them happiness -let alone could I wish them a change in a right and proper law.
We should keep our ban, flawed though it have more best to have it before - might be, tighten it, extend it, enforce it. And if there are still people out there who feel an urgent need for a pastime that allows them to show off their keen eye, their steady hand and their infinite talent for precision, then let them try embroidery."
