Video nasties - The easy target

Hello again reader(s). Apologies for my absence. Anybody miss me? Things have been uncommonly nuts around Moose Meadows these past few weeks. The jobs been piling on the pressure recently too. Most evenings I have just been coming home, watching some crap on the telly then going to bed. I hadn't read a newspaper for days and only found out about the petrol 'crisis' when I went to buy a pack of the bearly bloody smokeables. I've found it would be very easy to withdraw into the life of a state deluded sheep, working, paying taxes and not worrying. That's a danger I need to remain aware of.

Anyway, enough about me, lets talk about this story that brought me back to the blog.

Daniel Bartlam, 15, detained for mother's hammer murder

It's a sad story.One person is dead and another will spend the best years of his life in prison. It's also an unusual story. As a rule, teenagers don't go around bludgeoning their parents to death. For those reasons it's bound to get a lot of unwarranted media coverage and all the bansturbators will be coming out of the woodwork demanding that 'this never happens again'.

Why? People want answers. They want something tangible to blame. Simply because of it's rarity, this type of crime will have the masses questioning their own vulnerability. They like to feel safe and they like the state to provide that safety for them.

The sheep aren't overly concerned about burglary, muggings and car crime. These crimes are so commonplace in our society that they get little meaningful coverage in the press. For that reason they believe such crimes will never happen to them. And if they do? There's an entire army of councillors waiting to offer a shoulder to cry on (even if the police won't bother investigating).

This crime is different, and that's why it will be all over the news for at least a week. This crime cannot be blamed on poverty, racism or a father who never took his son fishing. This crime has no obvious reason or explanation.

This crime will interfere with Jonny Jobsworths sense of safety and security, and that my friends, we just can't have.

So we explain

A soap opera murder plot and violent TV clips were found on Daniel's computer.
It was also revealed Daniel had been watching violent horror films since he was eight and had viewed the film Saw hours before killing his mother.

So what? Are we to believe that films made this lad kill his mother? Why not? It's an easy explanation, it's believable and it boxes the whole thing off. Jonny Jobsworth and Tracy Toiler can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to sleep. Just as soon as the offending videos have been banned of course.

Even if films such as Saw were responsible for this lads actions, and of course there is absolutely no evidence for this, the real key point here is that he had been watching them since he was eight. The only (easy) way an eight year old can get hold of an eighteen rated movie is through his parents.

Adults will rarely take responsibility for their actions these days. If they don't want their children to watch horror films, they won't take on that task themselves, they will demand the government does it for them.

"For the sake of our kids, burn this video nasty!"

*That was the headline in The Sun, shortly after Robert Thompson and Jon Venables murdered the young James Bulger in 1993. The 'video nasty of the time was 'Childs Play 3: Chuckys revenge'.

This film of course had nothing to do with the terrible actions of these young boys; Robert Thompsons favourite film at the time was The Goonies, an excellent film that everyone should see at least once. The Sun however, had discovered that his father had recently rented the Chuckie film, and that became the scapegoat of the whole affair.

The scaremongering went all the way up to Parliament, as it invariably does. Tony Blair, the then Junior Shadow Transport Secretary, in an illiberal statement that became the norm for his later government, described the murder as,

"ugly manifestation of a society that is becoming unworthy of the name".

He proposed that films like Childs Play 3 should be banned not only for children but for all. The Guardian reported that moments after the trial verdict was in, a commons motion was tabled calling for the Home Office to investigate the role of video violence in creating the psychological impulses for this murder.

In the end, all that was achieved was hefty fines for videos shop owners who supplied films to underage children. A largely empty gesture as most children who gain access to restricted films do so through their parents, even more so back then than now with the availability of films online.

So prepare yourselves for another similar media frenzy as Saw becomes the reason why young Daniel Bartlam murdered his mother, and the next target of those who would abdicate personal responsibility and call on the government to take away another one of our freedoms.

This young lad is clearly disturbed, clearly has mental issues that would drive him to commit such an act. Are we to believe that video violence is responsible for this, or is it just an anomaly? Since the James Bulger debacle, Childs Play 3 is still available. The death toll has not gone through the roof.

The sheep will now be falling over themselves looking for that elusive explanation and attempting to ban something that had nothing at all to do with the incident.

This crime is a sad one. It's also an unusual one.

There are no answers here, barr one:

Shit happens.