I'm gonna skip over the rant about movies and media coverage. I feel there is no point in agruing that one.Here is a story to both reassure and chill. I met a man the other day who collects medals, classic motorbikes and Civil War muskets - a lot of muskets, more than 100, all with their barrels disabled. He also has a couple of First World War Vickers machine guns, both put beyond use.
For 20 years he has been a member of a rifle club and has a licence for the rifle he uses at Bisley, the national range. The only other shooting he does is clay pigeons. Again, he has a licence for his shotguns. He keeps his collection at his parents' house, locked away in large and secure cabinets. And there lies the rub.
His mother rang to tell him that he had left the barrel of a shotgun - only the barrel - out of the cabinet. He said he would pop over next day to put it back. Before he could, the police arrived at the house and said they had reason to believe that there was a gun on the premises that was not under lock and key. The only way they could have known this was by intercepting his call.
Now, I understand why this man would be on the radar of the counter-terrorist police. Post 7/7, people who collect as many guns as he does should be monitored. That is the reassuring part. What I find chilling is how far short of the profile of a likely terrorist this man is. He is an amiable, middle-aged Caucasian who runs a taxi company in a sleepy village on the Hampshire-Sussex border. A young, radicalised Muslim intent on waging jihad he is plainly not. Why are the police wasting their time monitoring his every call?
If this were an isolated incident, it wouldn't matter, but I have heard a number of stories lately of the police harassing licensed shotgun owners: doing spot checks and confiscating their guns if a husband happens to have told his wife where he keeps the key to his gun cabinet. Where is the sense of proportion? Where the common sense?
I hope the 15 Royal Navy crew members find good agents, because their story has exactly what commissioning editors at Channel 4 look for in a drama: the potential to show British servicemen in an unflattering light. In this case they could be -oh, I don't know - depicted as grovelling collaborators rather than people under "constant psychological pressure". It would be the next best thing to casting them as bullies and thugs.
Actually, Channel 4 executives must be cursing the timing of their release because it meant they had to postpone - needlessly in their view - the screening of The Mark of Cain, a drama about British soldiers who, brutalised by war, abuse Iraqi prisoners. Now there's an original theme. Who would have thought that war could be brutalising? I certainly hadn't been told this for years by every worthy writer out to earn himself a solemn pat on the back: "Brave work, very brave." It's about as profound a sentiment as Boy George's lyric "War, war is stupid" - and at least that had a sing-along tune.
There are several more dramas on the same theme in production at the moment. What we won't be seeing is a drama that -celebrates the British soldier, not now that the BBC has, in a fit of spinelessness, axed its drama about Johnson Beharry, the British soldier who won the VC in Iraq. Unbelievably, BBC bosses decided it would be "inappropriate" in the present climate to go ahead with a film in which a British soldier was depicted in an heroic light.
What is wrong with these people? Why are they so eaten up with hatred of their own country, and so ungrateful to the soldiers who risk their lives every day protecting them?
A truly brave and thought-provoking drama would be one that said: You know what? War is bad but it is also sometimes where men find themselves. In Beharry's case, war enabled him to rise above his harrowing childhood in Grenada and, through testing his courage in battle, find a new identity as a hero.
Or consider James Hewitt in the first Gulf War: as a tank commander he proved himself able and brave. In peacetime he has floundered, cast as a cad and a laughing stock. Or the novelist Nicholas Mosley: the Second World War allowed him to walk away from the dark shadow of his fascist father, Sir Oswald. He had a good war, won an MC. As he revealed in his recent autobiography, it was the making of him.
Anyway, enough of this column rage. Not good for my blood pressure. The nurses are arriving with the calming injection and the rug for my knees. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write to me these past several years. If I haven't replied yet, it doesn't mean I'm not going to.
Instead... When the NSA started harvested phone calls, we all got scared and angry. Our Constitutional rights were being violated we felt and I believe we were right to feel so. Britian does not extend the same Constitutional rights to her citizens (or are you subjects?) nor does she have the same Constitution, so only a British citizen would know if an actual British law or right has been violated by the police sniffing on phone calls like that.
But if the police are listening in so causally like that in England... I would start to wonder if I am really as free has I believe. Perhaps I am to nervious over such things.
My next area of contention:
Why? The 7/7 terrorist did not carry out a gun attack or to my knowledge even collect guns. So why does this event mean that legal gun collectors, most of them collecting guns from elder days warrent more susipions? Terrorist be it Tim McVeigh (OKC bomber) the 911 hijackers, and the 7/7 attackers do not tend to announce their assualts that way.Post 7/7, people who collect as many guns as he does should be monitored.
Nor would I. If it was me, I would gather my firearms illegally. Difficult? Perhaps but you're dealing with people willing to take the time and effort to assemble bombs, getting an illegal pistol can't be that much more time comsuming if you need a bang-bang.
Also has an aside. Judging on race alone is foolish, dangerous and is very likely not to work. Bosnian Muslims look like Italians not Arabs. Chenyians are as white has Irishmen. So even if only muslims engaged in terrorist activities (muslim terror groups account for only 35 to 40% of terrorist attacks in the world, that number is rising however) skin color still would not help us. Even if we ignored zealous converts like the various Jonny Talibans.
