ninme

Some are concerned with disproportionate responses and misplaced relativism, but I think I’m linking these two (three?) stories together for a different, subtler reason:

The Times - ‘He fired more shots. He held both hands on the gun. He never flinched’
The shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones has left a community in mourning, struggling to understand why the popular schoolboy died

Later he went to football training and was walking home with two friends at 7.30pm, a football still at his feet, when a hooded teenager on a BMX cycled up to them in the car park. A witness, a 42-year-old businessman who had walked out of the Fir Tree pub to have a cigarette, said that the teenager was 20 yards from him when he heard “a bang, which I thought was a firework”.

“As I looked around, he fired two more shots at his victim. He held both hands on the gun. He never flinched.

“The victim had on his football boots and a bag over his shoulder. He fell to the ground on his back and I ran up to him. Girls were screaming. He was trying to speak, but couldn’t get his words out. Then his mother arrived. She was leaning over him and saying, ‘Stay with us, son’.”

BBC - Brutal culture of US dog fighting
The indictment of star quarterback Michael Vick on dog fighting charges has shone a light on a vicious blood sport that appears to be thriving in the US.

No-one knows what motivated 27-year-old Vick, with his multi-million dollar American football contract, to venture into the murky world of dog fighting.

(Lord he’s my age.)

But there is evidence to suggest that its growth nationally is related to its adoption as a part of violent street culture.

John Goodwin, an expert on animal fighting for the Humane Society, says one way to track the prevalence of dog fighting is to monitor the number of pit bulls coming into animal rescue shelters.

Whereas 15 years ago 2-3% of the dogs brought in were pit bulls, the breed now makes up 30% of the total nationally and 50% in some areas, he said. One shelter in Mississippi reported taking in 300 pit bulls, of which 60% had scars indicating they had fought.

“Urban areas are where a lot of the growth has been and the shelters get inundated with the castaways from dog fighting,” Mr Goodwin said. “Dog fighting has become popular in gang culture.”

Times Online - Comment Central - The slums come to the suburbs, by Robbie Millen

Much of the anguish about the killing of Rhys Jones has focused on the tragedy of his life being cut short so young. But what makes his death stand out from the recent spate of slayings of teenage boys is that Rhys didn’t hail from the mean streets. Croxteth Park, by all accounts, is an “aspirational” suburb. Despite grim headlines about rising levels of violent crime, most of the disorder stays in the ghettos. This has allowed the middle-classes a luxurious degree of complacency about the dangers of Britain’s flourishing underclass. Well, not any more.

Theodore Dalrymple, responding to a gunning down of two girls in Birmingham back in 2003, wrote this article which deserves re-reading.

These are just everyday scenes from underclass life in Britain, a life to which our middle classes, intellectuals and politicians have remained impenetrably indifferent for many years. Never mind: before long, they will soon get a few lessons in underclass culture whether they like it or not. They won’t have to go to the slums: the slums will come to them.

Grimly prophetic.

So, there you go. You ignore it for long enough either because it doesn’t concern you or because you don’t want to be insensitive, and now everyone’s covered in shock and horror when suddenly it affects them (middle class towheaded 11-year-olds, dogs).