An article for 'Christian Today'

The website 'Christian Today' has asked me to write about the role of drugs in rampage killings. Some of you may like to read the article here

 

 

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/is.islamism.the.driving.force.behind.terror.no.its.worse.than.that/92569.htm

'How Not To Argue' the latest in an occasional series

Here is a comment by a person on Twitter , who blogs here http://barneteye.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/drugs-mass-murder-and-simplistic.html, which illustrates perfectly the impossibility of public debate with so many people. I analyse it below. My comments are marked ***:

Wednesday, 20 July 2016

'Drugs, mass murder and simplistic solutions

Peter Hitchens is a right wing ideologue,

***This is just ad hominem abuse levelled against me on the writer’s (possibly justified)  assumption that most of his his readers will automatically assume that ‘right-wing ideologue’ means ‘wicked, stupid person’ ***

who has recently

****as it happens this concern has not only been recent. It is consistent, long-standing and wide-ranging. I have been drawing attention to the correlation between various types of mind-altering drugs and all sorts of violent tragedies, from the Tucson massacre committed by Jared Loughhner and the GermanWings deliberate crash to the unhinged killing of a Church organist in Sheffield, the Anders Breivik episode and the Lee Rigby murder, for some years. My archived, indexed blog, or a Google search, will reveal this body of material stretching back some years ***

 been banging a drum claiming that the current 'plague of mass murders' can be attributed to the overuse of prescription and non prescription drugs.

***No. Actually, I have not been saying this at all.  I challenge him to find a quotation from the article here.. http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/07/is-the-latest-mass-murder-really-incomprehensible-.html

...which justifies this assertion.

 I have been saying (and I here quote from the article concerned, which contains a disclaimer typical of those in several articles I have published on the subject):

‘But the correlation revealed in this special subset of crimes is so strong that an inquiry into this correlation is long overdue. Once again, please do not accuse me of saying things I do not say, so as to avoid what I *do* say. The subject is too important for such silliness. The longer we neglect this problem, the more lives will be needlessly lost. I am not trying to excuse Islamic terrorists. I do not say all drugtakers are terrorists. I do not say all terrorists are drugtakers. Got that now? Good.’

Something similar may be found in this article:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/he-wasnt-no-terrorist-bruv-reflections-on-the-leytonstone-knife-outrage.html, in which I said : ‘Once again, let me explain that I am not saying that all terrorists use mind-altering drugs (though I think many do). Nor am I suggesting that all users of mind-altering drugs are terrorists. So don’t write to me as if I had said either of these things which I have not merely not said but specifically stated that I have not said.

 

I am saying that in this subset of violent crime, in which the media take an unusually detailed interest, we find that the culprits are often mentally ill and often users of mind-altering drugs. This suggests that it would be wise to investigate all culprits of violent crime to discover how strong this correlation is.’ ***

 He's picked up on the fact that cannabis use is endemic in ISIS killers and a goodly proportion of pampered middle class kids who go nuts and shoot up the local school/mall/football game are on some form of anti depressant. Hitchens has to fill space in his rather dull column, in a paper owned by a family who supported Hitler, and makes its money feeding the insecurities and paranoia of Middle England. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that Hitchens does not begin to tell the whole story.

***Again the above is ad hominem abuse, or wholly irrelevant. My column may be dull. THta is a matter of opinion.  My employer's grandfather had some seriously wrong opinions 80 years ago. That is a matter of record. But these do not influence the question which is 'Am I right?' ****

Let me start by explaining my approach to fixing problems (and this is clearly a problem which needs fixing). I am an engineer by trade and I come from a family of engineers. Both of my brothers are engineers. My father was a pilot in the RAF who spent the last 2 years of his commission acting as an air accident investigation officer. You may wonder what this has to do with understanding mass killers. Well quite a lot. as engineers, my father taught us, almost as soon as we could walk, to be analytic.

***PH remarks, well, good for him, but, as we see above, he didn’t seem to have prevented all his sons from indulging the sort of unscientific prejudices which would, if allowed among engineers, make their conclusions highly suspect. E.g., what if the investigator has a personal prejudice against the pilot involved? Or what if he, seeking the easy approval of colleagues or superiors, or powerful contractors, sees the advantages to himself of blaming ‘pilot error’ and so misses the actual reason for the crash? I am sure my attacker’s father never did these things. But my attacker seems highly prone to such errors. Perhaps we should be glad that he has not followed his father's trade***

***

He said that he'd never investigated a crash where there was a single cause.

***Perhaps not, though I think he would have to admit that there were crashes where there was a *major significant cause*, and other subsidiary ones. As for single causes, that does not mean that there have been none.  The problem of metal fatigue caused a series of disastrous crashes by De Havilland Comets in the early 1950s, for instance. Not merely was this the single cause. It took far too long to find because the minds of engineers and investigators were closed to the possibility, and they did not look for it . The first crash, for instance, was wrongly blamed on bad weather. Nevil Shute’s gripping novel ‘No Highway’ is a fine fictionalisation of such a problem, and its hero, an eccentric and unprepossessing engineer with a bee in his bonnet, is derided by colleagues and at one point almost dismissed before finally being proved right, and saving many lives.***

 In every case, there was a whole sequence of systemic failures that lead to the crash. Addressing these systemic failures, was his job. The results of his investigations, and every other investigation of every other plane crash before and since, has made air travel an extremely safe way to fly. Across the globe, authorities share data and info to ensure that every crash is investigated and the lessons learned used to make the industry safer.

In the UK, following the Dunblane massacre, gun control was massively tightened. This was an example of a lesson learned.

***Actually, it wasn’t. The Cullen report, which I have read (and which i suspect my scientific attacker hasn't)  and which I analyse in the chapter ‘Out of the Barrel of a Gun’ in my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’, revealed that appalling failures by individual police officers allowed Thomas Hamilton to retain a firearms certificate when it was clear that he was an untrustworthy and suspect person, and the certificate (and his guns) should have been taken away from him long before he committed his terrible crime. It specifically made no recommendation for a handgun ban, and the effect of the ban on the use of handguns in crime has been , so far as I know, non-existent – for the simple reason the guns used in crime are almost invariable illegally obtained.***

. It hasn’t stopped mass killers, but it has prevented a similar atrocity in the UK.

****Has it? It didn’t stop  Derrick Bird (who like Hamilton was allowed a firearms certificate,  and who used a lawfully-held rifle and a lawfully-held shotgun)  murdering 12 people in Cumbria 14 years later. Nor did it stop Raoul Moat’s rampage in Northumbria (Moat, like Anders Breivik and the Orlando killer, Mateen,  was on steroids)  the same year. ***

Does Hitchens have a point about the use of drugs being a factor? It is more than possible that in some cases it is, but it cannot be looked at in isolation. If every maniac shooter in the world (a miniscule proportion of the total number of people using them) were on anti depressants, would it prove a link? It would be worth investigating, but no it wouldn't. It would simply prove that people with mental health issues are more likely to have behavioural issues.

***This is an extraordinarily categorical statement on a subject about which it is impossible to be categorical. Unless and until the term ‘mentally ill’ acquires an objective testable definition, it merely shifts the question another paragraph down the page. The physical ingestion of mind-altering drugs, on the other hand, is an objective testable, provable fact, though alas not always discoverable given the authorities’ curerwent un8intwerest in the question.***

 What may be worth investigating is whether doctors are prescribing suitable treatments, because clearly if someone is under medical care and they start killing people, something has gone wrong. But  as I said above, that is just on piece of a very large jigsaw.

In the USA, lack of gun control is clearly the major factor.

***It clearly isn’t. US gun control (which has been relaxed since the 18^th century)  is in fact rather tighter than it was 50 years ago. But the number of these incidents, which began to take place in the 1960s, has increased despite these tightening restrictions. If it were the major factor, rather than a subsidiary factor (which it obviously is)  this simply could not be so. His father must surely have explained to him why this is so.***

  If disturbed people, on medication and sometimes with criminal records and on FBI watch lists have access to whatever weapons they fancy, it is clear that you have a recipe for disaster.

 

***The fallacy here is that by making it illegal for people to own guns, you prevent them from obtaining them illegally. Most gun crime is committed  with illegally held guns. There is a problem, of enforcement of gun bans in free societies. China, a rigid police state, successfully enforces such a ban, but suffers frequent knife massacres. Switzerland, which more or less requires its citizens to hold guns, suffers very few gun crimes. Thinking about this subject, which few people do, is complicated and difficult.***

 

 

***PH notes: the material below is not central to the point, but I have left it in anyway. Some of it verges on the sensible.***

Add to that the incessant stream of violent films, computer games, video clips on social media and you have a perfect storm for brainwashing the vulnerable.

But it doesn't stop there. We live in a society where family life is under constant attack. I don't mean in the way that Mr Hitchens and other right wing polemicists mean. They talk about the sanctity of marriage as the cornerstone of family life. I believe that quality family time spent together is the key(regardless of the composition of family unit). With the ever increasing demands on parents time, I wonder how many of the problems are caused by a lack of family love. Again, not every killer will have been left to their own devices, playing violent video games, whilst drinking fizzy drinks and eating microwave pizza, for years on end. But I suspect for a goodly percentage, it is a factor.

And nutrition. How big a role does this play in regulating our behaviour? As a dyslexic, I read that oily fish improves brain function. Therefore I eat it regularly. Does it work? I don't know but I am far more productive and creative than I was in my early 20's on a diet of sausages, beer and bacon sarnies.

I suspect that bad nutrition is a factor, causing chemical imbalances, that leads to the situation where depression can occur. I don't believe eating a Big Mac transforms a sane happy individual into a psychopath, but a long term pattern of bad nutrition, vitamin deficiency and the associated side effects is yet another building block.

Another cause, one which there is research into, is brain irregularities causing bad behaviour. It is well documented that MRI scans of violent offenders shows significant correlation between violent behaviour and under development of areas of the brain. I read a study several years ago, where a researcher claimed he could predict the abnormalities identified in MRI scans from a criminals jail history. Could we spot future mass killers just by giving them a brain scan? I doubt it, in the short term, but it warrants further investigation.

And there are other factors that play a significant role in our behaviour. Studies have shown that rates of violent crime have plummeted since the addition of Lead to petrol was banned. Are there other substances/food additives that are playing a role?

And finally I wonder about violent sexual images. The internet is awash with these. 50 years ago we in the UK were taught to be respectful. If violence is equated to sexual tittilation, can we really be too surprised if this leads to extreme behaviour, especially in societies where there is free access to guns.

For me, the issues I mentioned above are all part of the jigsaw that fits together to form the personality of the type of person in the West, who commits mass killings. I don't think any one factor on its own will act as a trigger. Clearly if you throw into the mix a demagogue promoting a violent ideology, that bears no opposition, this will make these issues even more dangerous. Some commentators blame religion, but the worst mass killers of the last 100 years were secular, such as Pol Pot and Stalin. Dangerous demagoguery comes in all shapes, sizes, creeds and colours. To claim otherwise is to close our eyes to human nature.

As I mentioned at the top, I believe that the way to address these issues is not simply to look at each case then close the book. We need a global initiative to understand the causes, identify the common factors which can be dealt with, and to make sure that every time we get a mass killing, every agency that has a lesson to learn, gets the opportunity to learn. Such an approach has made flying safe. Far more people die in mass killings than air accidents, so surely it warrants a UN commission to address it. The idea that there is a simple answer would be like assuming that a fix that would prevent the undercarriage of a Lancaster Bomber collapsing on takeoff, would prevent every future plane crash in eternity. This is where polemicists such as Hitchens go wrong. The world is constantly evolving. The challenges my teenage children face are radically different to those I faced in the 1970's. The solutions are also radically different. Mass killers have always been around. What has changed is there toolkit, their motivation, their access to weaponry and their ability to use the Internet to feed their obsessions.

Whilst I suspect a bit of gun control in the U.S. would make a massive difference there to the number of deaths, without all of the other factors being addressed, sadly it will be a major issue for a very long time.'

Some Reflections on the Orlando Horror

We need an inquiry into the correlation between drug abuse and violence. I believe this is the most rational and effective response to the horrific news from Orlando.

We know already that Omar Mateen had a history of using Steroids, suspected of being linked with severe mood swings. Steroids were also used by the 2011 Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik by Raoul Moat, the 2010 Northumberland killer , and by David Bieber, the 2003 Leeds murderer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/12/omar-mateen-everything-we-know-so-far-about-orlando-gunman/

The same report cites the Imam of the mosque Mateen attended, who noted a change in his behaviour in recent years. He had become aggressive and uncommunicative. He was a wife beater.  His former wife, Sitora Yusifiy, described him  as mentally unstable . It may also be significant that she said he was ‘bipolar’ (a subjective ‘diagnosis’ common in modern psychiatry which in recent years has often been followed by the prescription of ‘antidepressants’).

See also here http://www.nbcnews.com/video/orlando-gunman-s-ex-wife-he-had-a-history-with-steroids-mental-illness-704171587760). His wife says he would ‘get mad out of nowhere’ He was ‘mentally unstable and mentally ill. He had a history of steroids. I don’t know if that caused it. I am sure it had something to do with it.’

I will also mention here the fact I always mention: mass gun ownership in the USA has existed from the start. It is my belief that the gun laws of the USA were laxer 50 years ago than they are now, in that big cities such as New York City had not then introduced ordinances forbidding the carrying of weapons.

Yet shootings of the kind we now see – lone individuals appearing in public places and murdering complete strangers until killed by the police, or until committing suicide, do not occur in any significant number until the 1960s. Look, for example, at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

So it is simply illogical to attribute these shootings, in their modern form,  to guns *alone* Of course the availability of guns forms an important part of the explanation, but their presence in large numbers is still , by itself, an *insufficient* explanation for this specific phenomenon. The same obvious point can be made about the far smaller number of such shootings in Switzerland, a country where there is also very widespread possession of guns by private citizens.  

Likewise, countries with strict gun laws, such as Britain, Germany and Finland, have also experienced mass shootings of this kind. Again these tend to have happened in the last half-century, a period during which the use of mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, has been increasingly common in advanced and wealthy societies.  It is also the case that comparable knife attacks in schools and other public places are quite common in China,  a police state which has successfully restricted the ownership if guns by private citizens. So if our purpose is to prevent such shootings in future, then it seems to me we have a duty to go beyond making speeches or writing articles about the folly of US gun laws. These may be morally self-satisfying, and politically popular. But they do not seem to me to address the complexity of the issue.

Many of the culprits of mass shootings are *known* to have been users of mind-altering drugs, including steroids, marijuana and some ‘antidepressants’  legally prescribed or illegally taken.  In many other such cases, we do not know and cannot find out (sometimes because medical records are sealed ) if this is the case or not. In hundreds of less-publicised and less-examined crime, the police and media never ask, so again we do not know. The subset of terrorist crimes and mass shootings is important because, in almost all cases, the question is at least asked and sometimes answered. Given these limitations, the apparent correlation between drugs and killing is at least striking. Since I first noticed it, I have generally been fairly sure that such a link would emerge in case after case, and have found that, within a day or two, it usually does.

But it is capricious. The lack of interest on the part of the authorities and conventional media is astonishing. They already have their own explanations ( US gun laws or Islamist terror, or in this case both) and so are easily satisfied. Anders Breivik’s steroid use only emerged thinks to his own casual reference to it in his revolting rambling ‘testament’.  Likewise the presence of the benzodiazepine Xanax and the amphetamine Adderall in the flat of the San Bernardino killers was mentioned in passing by a reporter who had access to their apartment but saw no special significance in the presence of these drugs there. On a slightly different kind of case, though it involved many violent deaths, there is scant interest in the undoubted use of 'antidepressant' pills by the GermanWings pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who flew his aircraft into a mountainside, apparently deliberately.   What can we conclude from these cases? Nothing – except that there is an *apparent* correlation between the sue of mind-altering drugs and severe, unhinged violence. My conclusion from that is that we need a full-power state-backed international inquiry to see if this connection exists and is significant.

I listed some of the pointers here five years ago

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/one-more-mass-killer-one-more-drug-addled-mind.html

And I compiled a supplementary list of more recent drug-influenced terror killers and other criminals here

few months ago.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/04/that-list-in-full-violent-major-criminals-who-have-used-cannabis.html

I am not here going to examine the logic of tighter gun laws, except to say that enforcement of such laws in a free society is extremely difficult, and that almost all gun crime (in countries with such laws) is committed by guns which have been illegally obtained and are illegally held, and generally by people who already have serious criminal convictions and who would be barred from gun ownership even in the USA.

I have no desire to own a gun and would not want gun ownership to be widespread in Britain, though I have lived, worked and travelled in territory covered by the Second Amendment and hardly saw a gun (except in the possession of a police office, or on visits to gun shops made in the course of work) in all that time. The only privately-owned gun I saw was in the handbag of a female public prosecutor in the State of Virginia, who believed it was essential protection when she was travelling alone. She thought it foolish that Washington D.C. at that time had laws preventing her from carrying it when driving through that city, parts of which were notorious for gun crime, and mass illegal gun-ownership by drug gangs.

My only point here is to plead for facts and reason, rather than emotion, exaggerated fear of Islamic terror or anti-American snobbery, to govern our response to the Orlando butchery.

Once again, because stupid people with closed minds will seek to misrepresent what I say, I am not saying that all mass killings are caused by drug abuse, that all users of psychiatric drugs or steroids are mass murderers, or that all users of marijuana are mass murderers, or that Islam has nothing whatever to do with terror acts committed in its name by people who are themselves living very non-Islamic lives. If I thought these things, I would say them. As I don’t think them, I don’t say them. And in a world of closed minds, where it is considered legitimate to misrepresent and twist any dissenting view,  it has become necessary now actually to say specifically that I am *not* saying these things. I hope this is clear. What I am saying is that there is enough evidence for there to be an inquiry. Let it be soon.

Once Again, Are We Investigating these Mass Murders Properly?

Curious, isn’t it, how the ‘gun control’ campaign is quite incapable of paying attention to any other possibilities? And how it is immune to logic?

I criticise this incessant campaign not because I don’t share its objectives, but because it is so completely illogical, and resistant to fact.

I have no desire to own a gun (though I don’t see why, as a responsible adult,  I  shouldn’t be free to do so if I chose). On the contrary, I dislike being in the presence of guns even when I know them to be unloaded.

I understand that ‘gun control’ is the modern left’s alternative to the death penalty, which the modern left claim to have rejected because it is so ghastly and immoral, and because, well, I mean,  what if you execute the wrong person?  They haven’t, in fact rejected it at all. They are relaxed (that is to say, I have never seen a sustained liberal campaign against this)  about the growing number of extrajudicial killings by armed police (some of these must be the wrong person, no?) in the USA and – now – here. They claim to be unable see any connection between the growth of this form of law enforcement and the abolition of an effective, swift and certain death penalty.

We already know that those US cities which adopted strict gun control (especially Washington DC) actually achieved no significant consequent reduction in gun violence.

We know in ghastly detail that a country with very strict gun controls, France, can suffer the most appalling gun massacres, because it is one thing to enact gun control, and something else altogether to enforce it in a country where there are huge numbers of cheap AK-47s already circulating on the illegal market.

We know that gun ownership alone does not necessarily lead to gun violence, from the example of Switzerland. So we know that gun ownership, by itself, cannot be the cause of this problem and that therefore to concentrate upon gun ownership by the law-abiding is an illogical response.

But, after two recent horrors in the USA, President Obama and the New York Times and everyone else but me are raging either about gun control or about terrorism or about both.

The first of these horrors is the case of Robert Dear, who murdered three people and wounded nine more at a ‘Planned Parenthood’ (love that name!)  clinic in Colorado Springs.

Even the New York Times’s report here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/robert-dear-suspect-in-colorado-killings-preferred-to-be-left-alone.html?_r=0

....eventually gets round to mentioning the strong suspicion that Dear (and look at his mugshots) might be a drug user and out of his mind. The evidence is circumstantial but in a state where marijuana is legal now and has been , er, lightly policed for some time, it rather has to be until someone takes  a definite interest.

You might enjoy the US Cannabis Lobby’s defence to this charge, here

http://www.thecannabist.co/2015/11/30/robert-dear-marijuana-planned-parenthood/44536/

The other is the San Bernardino shooting,  in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ‘nationalised’, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies,  before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There’s also the usual talk of ‘radicalisation’, a speculation that doesn’t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

 

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I’ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ‘terror’ is the explanation.

Well, now look at today’s ‘Australian’  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/san-bernardino-massacre-a-hatred-beyond-reason/news-story/5af7a1b4463bc493a852a0f634a73ab5

This opens : ‘Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.’

 

Who says they were ‘prescribed to steady the nerves’? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed.   But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ‘alprazolam’? Why, it’s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family.   Look it up.  Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ‘paradoxical reactions’ (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall,  this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or its equally phantasmal relative ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’.  No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ‘treated’ with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions. 

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think)  to begin prescribing their ‘medications’ to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ‘Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects’.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.  

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don’t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

Please don’t tell me I’m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat of Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police.  I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don’t tell me I’m offering a single cause. I am not. I just think that here, unlike the irrational emotive futility of ‘gun control’, there might possibly be a way in which we might conceivably diminish the number of these ghastly incidents. Who could possibly object to an investigation into that?

Well, who could?

What Do We Know About The Gunman on the Amsterdam-Paris Train?

Let us see what we know about the violent incident on a Paris-bound Thalys train from Amsterdam, which has universally been classified as a terrorist episode – apart from the heartening fact, shown by the astonishingly brave actions of those who overpowered the gunman and saved the life of one of his victims,  that there are still young men among us who are capable of disinterested courage in the face of mortal danger.

Late Addition:  In 'The Guardian' of Tuesday 25th August, see 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/24/chris-norman-describes-how-helped-overpower-french-train-gunman

One of the brave men who overpowered the gunman, British IT consultant Chris Norman , is quoted as saying: “He was slight, he didn’t appear to me to be very strong ... But I was also concerned that he was on drugs of some sort and who knows what kind of strength that can give? So I was being very cautious.” 

 

Who is the arrested man?

Let us start by seeing what we know, or think we know, about Ayoub El-Khazzani, the man of Moroccan origin said to have initiated the attack on the train.

 

His father Mohammed El-Khazzani, born in Morocco in 1950,  told the Daily Telegraph (24/8, p.10) that his son was one of four children. The father, who ‘recycles materials for a living’ This probably means collecting tin cans and other garbage for a tiny pittance, a way of life I have seen people reduced to in many parts of the world from South Africa to Japan, and which is pretty much the lowest point before utter destitution . He does this in one of Algeciras's poorest areas,  El Saladillo.  The weeping parent said that ‘after a troubled spell in Madrid, when he was arrested twice for selling hashish in 2009’, his son had ‘given up smoking the drug’ and seemed very calm. Quite how his father, hundreds of miles away from Madrid, and across the Straits of Gibraltar from Ceuta (another of his son’s haunts) could know if his son had actually given up the drug, or how calm he was, I don’t know.  Other reports ( see below) suggest that this fond parent may have been misinformed.

 

Then, The Daily  Telegraph reported,  the father blamed a French telecommunications company for his son's apparent transformation. He said that six Moroccan youths from Algeciras were taken to work in France 18 months ago on six-month contracts.

 

‘"Then after one month they were just kicked out. What is he meant to do? What is he supposed to eat?" Other residents of El Saladillo were similarly shocked. "He and his brother were very devout, dressed like Afghans, but I can't believe this," said one young man of Moroccan origin.’

 

Do we know he is a terrorist?

The ‘Independent’ of the same day reported that ‘His (El-Khazzani’s) lawyer Sophie David told French television he had denied attempted murder because the Kalashnikov had jammed and no shots were fired . This does not seem to be quite true. Khazzani also had a handgun, which was presumably the source of the one bullet which definitely hit a passenger, Mark Moogalian. Mr Moogalian had exposed himself to peril when he with great bravery grabbed the AK-47 from El-Khazzani.    In a part of the story which seems immensely moving and impressive to me, and which makes me think I should take a course in emergency medicine, Spencer Stone (who had himself had his thumb nearly severed by the gunman) appears to have saved Mr Moogalian’s life by putting his fingers into Mr Moogalian’s neck wound and pressing on the artery until professional help arrived.  How this wound came about if no shot was fired, I am not sure. How many of us would have known how to do this, or been able to do it when the need actually arose in conditions of great fear and confusion, and when ourselves had been savagely slashed and punched in the eye?

 

The claim that the AK-47 had jammed is, as it happens,  confirmed by Spencer Stone’s account  . He told ‘The Guardian’ ‘It (the AK-47) looked like it was jammed’ .  Possibly it had jammed after firing a burst, or a single shot, as Mr Moogalian was definitely shot. More likely (see below) the bullet came from another gun.

 

Stone’s friend Alek Skarlatos (who has served in the Oregon National Guard) said he thought Khazzani ‘clearly had no firearms training’. He did not say this to claim that Khazzani was not dangerous – he specifically stated that he was and could easily have done a lot of harm had he not been overpowered.  It is just an observation which I found interesting in trying to work out what sort of person Khazzani is.

 

His lawyer said (again in the Independent): "He is stunned that his action is being characterised as terrorism,"   Ms David said Khazzani had said he was homeless, and that despite his impressive arsenal of weapons he "didn't seem dangerous to me" but "haggard" and "very thin… as if he had malnutrition".

‘He has told police he was intending to rob the passengers on the train before shooting a window and jumping out, and that he found the weapons in a Brussels public park near the train station.’

 

I have to say I find it hard to believe his claims that he had ‘found’ firearms in a park (if so, why didn’t he leave them where he had found them?) ,  but quite what terrorist purpose would be served by randomly killing people on a train from Amsterdam to Paris I am not sure.

 

I do know that the Brussels station where he boarded the train is the centre of a notoriously lawless zone of that city in which weapons are on widespread illegal sale for criminal purposes. El-Khazzani’s behaviour sounds to me to be chaotic and irrational, rather than trained, organised and purposeful, and I am still waiting for details about how, on what passport and with whose money he made the visit to Syria which he has been widely reported to have undertaken. If he was trained there, his training does not seem to have impressed at least one person who definitely does have military knowledge, Alek Skarlatos.

 

Also from the ‘Independent’ we have this account: ‘Khazzani was placed on France's watch list in 2014 after Spanish security services warned them he may have links to radical Islam, according to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

‘Spanish security sources said he had a police record for drug dealing, and that he travelled to Syria and first came under their radar after attending a Salafist mosque while living in Algeciras with his parents. The suspect denies travelling to Syria, according to [ his lawyer] Ms David.’

Belgium also confirmed Khazzani was known to their intelligence services. Khazzani's father Mohamed was born in Tétuan in Morocco in 1950, according to El Pais newspaper, and moved to Spain in the 1990s.

 

Is there a Cannabis Connection?

Khazzani was arrested twice in 2009 in Madrid for cannabis possession, and again in 2012 in Spanish territory in North Africa(**PH notes: was this for cannabis possession? It is implied but not stated. See below for strong suggestion it was).   In 2015, he reportedly lost his residency permit.’

 

The Times (which is behind a paywall), also reported that  El Khazzani, who is 25, was arrested three times for drugs offences - twice in Madrid in 2009, and for a third time in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, in September 2012. This suggests that the third arrest noted above was for cannabis, and thus his father’s claims (noted above)  that he had given up the drug in 2009 were mistaken.

 

The Times also noted that El Khazzani was listed as a "religious extremist" by  Spanish security police, which led to his details being circulated ( as it seems, rather uselessly) to police forces across the EU . He seems to have been listed as a "dangerous individual".

 

The Times quoted a ‘counter-terrorism source as saying: ’We think that it was while in Jail that he became radicalised," a counterterrorism source said yesterday. ‘This shows the link between drug trafficking and Islamist extremism. It is a habitual way of financing terrorism.’

 

I have not seen any details of jail sentences served by El Khazzani, though the Daily Mirror says today (p.12) that he served time in a Spanish jail for drug offences ‘soon after arriving from Morocco in 2007’ and the Sunday Telegraph reported on 23^rd August that he was ‘reported to have been convicted for drug offences and to have spent some time in a Spanish jail.’  but I certainly concur that many of those Muslims involved in violent incidents, from Ottawa to Woolwich and Paris,  have been involved in petty crime and drugs, generally cannabis. 

 

 

In all such stories, there is an initial fog of confusion, unavoidable in the rush to compile as much information as possible against deadlines. I shall wait until we know a good deal more before jumping to any conclusions.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Let's have an Inquiry NOW into the Correlation Between Drugs and Rampage Killings.

Who wouldn't want such an inquiry, and why?

 

One of the worst things about conventional wisdom is the thick carapace of self-satisfied certainty which protects it from attack.  To dissent from the belief that America’s gun crimes are mainly caused by lax gun laws is to risk the most extraordinary level of semi-deliberate misunderstanding.

 

I say ‘semi-deliberate’ because I can’t think of any other way of describing a refusal to listen or absorb which appears to be a conscious and wilful act, and feels like one. In fact, those who are behaving in this way, often very vigorously and self-righteously, do not know that they are doing it. They know, as do all victims of conventional wisdom, that what they believe is the unmixed truth.  Since the abolition of effective death penalties in Anglosphere countries, the liberal response to murderous violence –supposedly a humane alternative to the swift exemplary execution of heinous killers, actually no such thing -  has always been ‘tough’ gun law. So, support for ‘gun law’ is not just about policy, but a declaration of allegiance to a particular version of moral rectitude. Thus, anyone who challenges them is wrong, ignorant,  stupid etc.

 

And thus they interpret what they hear to suit this. It is of course quite obvious – so obvious and repeatedly argued that it seems to me not be worth stating - that the mass-ownership of guns, unrestricted by law, has *some* influence on crime , suicide, domestic accidents etc. in the USA. This is beyond dispute.  Yet supporters of ‘gun control’ almost invariably respond to what I say by assuming that I believe that such gun ownership has *no* influence on these things. I have no such view. I have not said any such thing.  It is a factor.  But is it, in the cases with which we increasingly have to deal, the *decisive* or even the most significant factor?

 

 

 

Many also assume that I’m some sort of gun nut, when I neither own nor seek to own any firearm.

 

They think this because they can then dismiss me as absurd and unhinged. But it’s not what I think, or what I say, or what I do. What I think is that we all need to think, and that to do so we need to escape from this mental cliché. My main opinion is that correlations between drugtaking (legal and illegal) and irrational violence  increasingly demand a proper inquiry into whether there is another more powerful and significant common factor in these massacres. And that to obtain such an inquiry, we need to stop going into a thought-free gun law frenzy each time one of these horrors takes place.  Doing so prevents serious consideration of the problem.

 

I might add that the current furore about the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag near official buildings in South Carolina (while undoubtedly an interesting issue) is almost wholly irrelevant to the case, whereas Roof’s drug use is hugely relevant. Yet which of the two attracts more political and media attention? You guessed it.

 

The question before us is why we are seeing massacres of innocent people by unhinged assailants. None of these massacres is remotely rational. They serve no political purpose, gain nothing material or otherwise for the perpetrator , who in most cases does away with himself at the end.   This is a worldwide phenomenon, not restricted to the USA. Nor does it always involve guns. We learn here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E2%80%9312) that in China (where gun massacres, such as that in Tiananmen Square, Peking,  in 1989, are a state monopoly, and private citizens are genuinely unable to obtain guns) there are comparable massacres involving knives and hammers. We don’t of course know how common this sort of thing is because China lacks a free press, and incidents of this kind could happen without being reported.

 

People may say that these events are different, and so they are. An unhinged person with a machete , a knife or a hammer is more easily subdued than one with a gun. Even so, he can do a lot of harm beforehand, and the point being made here is that the weapon itself is not the decisive feature of this sort of crime.  No state, not even the Chinese police state, could mount an effective ban on ownership of knives, machetes and hammers. 

 

A gun ban in the USA, even if constitutionally permissible, would not be enforceable without the introduction of a repressive state so powerful as to transform the country. Even then it would be difficult because of the existing levels of illegal gun ownership. Legally registered guns might quite easily be confiscated from their owners. But the millions of illegal ones? Various local gun bans in the USA (notably that in the District of Columbia, whose summer nights echoed with gunfire in its eastern segments, after a gun ban was imposed there) have proved ineffectual, to put it mildly, affecting only the law-abiding.  So if we are interested in stopping or seriously reducing these events, then we need to look elsewhere.

 

People tell me that Britain has had far fewer such events. This is perfectly true, and it would be interesting to wonder why. But, having lived in both countries, I can never warn strongly enough against assuming that the USA is just a big Britain. It is different in almost every conceivable way, and for more than a century (mostly the 19^th century , a period during which Britain was not famed for gun crime) Britain’s gun laws were more relaxed than those of Texas.

 

One reason for the difference (out of many) could be that the chemicalising of psychiatry, the replacement of therapy and mental hospitals with bottles of pills, got under way earlier in the USA than it did in Britain, and we are simply behind.

 

There’s also been a huge lack of interest in the drug issue.   I’ve never heard of any serious investigation into the mental state of Michael Ryan, culprit of the 1987 Hungerford massacre, any interest expressed in whether he was taking prescribed psychiatric medication or whether he was a user of illegal mind-altering drugs (by 1987 cannabis had been in common use in Britain for at least 20 years) . Nor have I ever seen any examination of the mental state of  Thomas Hamilton, the culprit of the 1996 Dunblane murders, though Hamilton was clearly in the grip of persecution mania. In both cases, media and official responses were entirely directed towards the issue of guns.

 

The culprit of the 1989 Monkseaton shootings (in which most of the victims survived , and only one died), Robert Sartin,  pleaded insanity at his trial, but again I have seen no detail of this insanity, or of what ‘treatment’ he may have had before he dressed in black and went out on a bloody rampage with his father’s shotgun.

 

The 2010 Cumbria shootings by the taxi-driver, Derrick Bird, remain equally inexplicable if the shooter is assumed to be rational. Only if he was unhinged can the actions be explained consistently. But individual madness is rare in humans who have not undergone severe personal shock and tragedy, or some sort of external physical trauma, physical or chemical. But there was only one hint that he may have sought help for his mental health, oddly in a report in an Australian newspaper, otherwise nothing. At the time I suspected he might have been taking prescription ‘antidepressants’, and asked if this was so. I was told that it wasn’t so, though I am not sure how this was established beyond question. Had I been looking into it now, I would be equally interested to know if he had been using cannabis. In a report that sent a shudder down my spine, it did emerge that he had been prevented from boarding a Thailand-bound flight at Doha because of a bizarre outburst of rage. One report (Daily Mail, 5^th June 2010) said :

 

‘DERRICK Bird was deported back to Britain last year - following a drunken rage at an airport.

Security at Doha in Qatar would not allow him to join his connecting flight to Thailand because they feared he was a 'flight risk'.

Bird was heading for Pattaya on a pre-Christmas holiday with taxi-driving colleagues when he began drinking on the plane before a short stop-over at Doha.

An argument started when another member of the group began teasing Bird about money. Friends say Bird lashed out at the departure gate and had to be restrained.

Police deemed that he was too drunk and worried about letting him get on the plane to Bangkok after his violent behaviour. He was held in a secure location to sober up and then put on a flight back to London.

One friend said: 'I heard that there was quite a lot of banter, like you would expect there to be, and they'd had a few drinks on the plane. When they arrived in Doha, they all seemed to be getting on all right. Then when Birdy mentioned that he loved Thailand because it was cheap someone made a joke about being cheap.

'Birdy saw red and went for him and officials had to step in. The friends had never seen him flip before and it shocked them.'

 

The outburst is attributed to drink. Perhaps this is correct, though it seems unlikely to me.  I wonder whether its real cause was in fact something else.  But I doubt if we’ll ever know now.

 

In the case of Raoul Moat … see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/07/where-was-the-robocop-army-when-mister-moat-was-busy-selling-drugs.html

 

we do know that he was taking ‘antidepressants’ and steroids. Likewise, though nobody in authority has ever cared about in the slightest, we know that the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik was taking steroids too….

 

In the 2002 Erfurt school massacre, in which 16 innocent people died in a  country (Germany) with pretty strict gun laws, the culprit (expelled student Robert Steinhaueser) is said in some internet reports to have taken antidepressants and LSD, though the information never featured in English-language reports of his crime. As with so many of those cases, because neither police nor media were interested, this aspect of the matter was not investigated.

 

This interesting essay contains a fascinating summary of the evidence in the case:

 

http://correctmaple.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/school-shootings-drug-theory.html

 

Note the very striking point made about the second Columbine shooter, Dylan Klebold, whose medical history has never been revealed. His accomplice, Eric Harris, had undoubtedly been taking ‘antidepressants’.  One interesting point made by this author is that the sort of school shooting we now see as common only really began in 1979.

 

There had been other such incidents before then, but the random shootings of schoolfellows only really begin about 35 years ago.  Did guns become easier to obtain in 1979? No, but by then the now-universal policy of ‘treating’ mental illness with powerful mind-altering drugs, instead of admitting the mentally ill to hospitals, was well-established. The widespread prescription of ‘antidepressants’ was also common, and of course, cannabis was circulating freely in schools and colleges.

 

In Finland, regarded by some readers of this blog as a sort of leftist paradise, whose gun laws might be viewed by liberals as a model for the USA, there was in 2007 a school massacre at Jokela.  Pekka-Eric Auvinen murdered eight people before killing himself. Auvinen is said in some accounts to have taken ‘antidepressants’. A Finnish government report also states ( according to this site http://www.drugawareness.org/ssri-antidepressant-2008-finnish-school-shooting-10-dead/

that Matti Saari, perpetrator of another more recent school massacre in Finland (Kauhajoki, ten dead) was taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’ and benzodiazepine at the time of his crimes.  I would be interested if any reader can confirm or indeed deny the veracity of this.

 

According to the Lew Rockwell blog here (without doubt a partisan witness, but judge for yourselves)

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/06/no_author/the-big-list-of-drug-induced-killers/

 

‘According to a data set of U.S. mass shootings from 1982-2012 prepared by Mother Jones magazine, of 62 mass shootings carried out by 64 shooters, the majority of the shooters (41) were noted to have signs of possible mental illness — the precise kinds of mental illnesses that psychotropic medications are prescribed for.

It is a well-documented fact that in the 1980s, a shift occurred in the direction of treating the mentally ill. Rather than institutionalize them, the preferred method was to “mainstream” them, encouraging them to function in society while being treated with a mind-numbing array of new anti-depressants being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.’

 

The site then lists a number of relevant cases.

 

Interestingly, the case of James Holmes, culprit of the July 2012 cinema murders in Aurora , Colorado, turns out to have a drug aspect not widely noted at the time. This, I think, is a characteristic of many of these events. Some time after the event, the drug details are unearthed and given limited media play. But most people remain unaware of this and so do not see the correlation. It is only because I am interested already that I know.  This sort of knowledge rarely influences policy.

 

Police found medications in Homes’s apartment, including sedatives and the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam. They also found the antidepressant sertraline, the generic version of the antidepressant Zoloft. See http://www.denverpost.com/ci_22955988/judge-unseals-warrants-affidavit-aurora-theater-shooting-case

 

This wasn’t known at the time. Yet I speculated as follows in my blog of 28^th July 2012: ‘Another mass killer, another link to drugs

An intelligent person would surely wonder why rampage massacres are becoming increasingly common.

America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn’t, and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany – yet these horrible events happen there too. 
What’s more, even in the USA mass killings  of this type have become common only in modern times.

The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.

The New York Post quoted one of his neighbours as saying he had seen him smoking cannabis, a drug whose carefully created ‘peaceful’ image is contradicted in many trials of violent or homicidal people.’

 

I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis-user.  This report from the Manchester Evening News contains one of the most astonishing and under-played quotations (about guns and cannabis farms) I have ever seen, and portrays a person who is far from mentally normal and (by his own account) has ready access to cannabis.

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/im-not-bothered-gunman-kiaran-690858

 

 

And I should mention the appalling and distressing case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun.

 

An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-18771406

 

Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.

 

Then there was the Adam Lanza case, at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. At the time of this unspeakable crime there was no information available on what Lanza might have been taking. There is still some coming and going about Lanza’s drug use, on which I have yet to see a final determination.  This (again partisan)  site http://ssristories.org/the-antipsychotic-prescribed-to-adam-lanza-has-a-troubled-history-all-its-own-business-insider/

suggests that Lanza was prescribed an antidepressant, which he rejected. Then it refers to a report in New York magazine (based on  statements by Lanza’s uncle reported in the New York Daily News) that Lanza had later been prescribed the drug Fanapt

 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/aspergers-is-a-red-herring-to-explain-newtown.html

 

If you follow the link you then find this very curious note

 

Editor's Note: This post originally cited a report in the Daily News that quoted Adam Lanza's uncle as saying he was taking an anti-psychotic drug called Fanapt. The Daily News subsequently deleted the quote. It is now unclear whether Lanza was taking Fanapt.

 

Then we find this : http://www.infowars.com/state-of-connecticut-refuses-to-release-adam-lanzas-medical-records/

Another highly partisan site whose report ( based on a recording which makes pretty astonishing viewing) I have been unable to find in any mainstream publication. You may judge for yourself what value to give it.

 

As I was writing this article, the trial of Nicholas Salvador concluded with the Jury deciding he was insane at the time he murdered and beheaded 82-year-old Palmira Silva. Mrs Silva’s family are understandably distressed by this verdict, but there is a good chance that Salvador can now be kept locked up until he dies, which might not have been the case had he been convicted of murder. I also tend to think the Jury were right to attribute his actions to insanity. Consider this. Had the killing had a ‘terrorist’ connection, they might have found it harder to do so, even though the circumstances were identical. They might have been accused of ‘condoning’ or ‘trying to excuse’ Islamic extremism, as I have ludicrously been for my comments on the mental state of the killers of Lee Rigby.

 

Most but not all of the reports of Salvador’s very distressing trial have mentioned his heavy use of cannabis, but as a sort of side-issue or afterthought. In fact, his appalling and unhinged behaviour reminds me very strongly of the conduct of Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, on the day when they murdered Lee Rigby. See

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/11/theresas-right-we-do-face-a-dire-new-threat-from-people-like-her-.html

 

It is also reminiscent of the murder and beheading of Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife in May 2011. Once again, the killer, Deyan Deyanov, was a known user of marijuana. Cannabis also connects both the recent ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on soldiers in Canada (treated as primarily terrorist by politicans and media), and all the killers in the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ affair and its accompanying crimes.

 

But these cases are not connected in the public mind or the official mind or the media mind. Nor does anyone attempt to make sense of them, because the various conventional templates of modern concern – Islamic terror, race hate, gun law – actually prevent people from seeing any link. As they do now.

 

I really don’t know what purpose people think they serve when they oppose my calls for a proper inquiry into this correlation. If I am right, then they are postponing vital action. If I am wrong then what harm will have been done by looking into it?  

'Posh tests' won't rob your child of a job - socialist snobs did that years ago

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Why is the Tory high command in love with Alan Milburn, a chip-on-the-shoulder Blairite class warrior, who shows little sign of having grown out of the Marxism he once embraced?

George Osborne and Michael Gove have publicly praised this former Labour Minister, and he has been put in charge of a nasty little quango, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Under his leadership, this body ceaselessly complains that Britain is unfair (which, of course, it is) while flatly refusing to mention the main reason – the disastrous comprehensive school system.

Last week, launching a particularly silly report, Mr Milburn claimed: ‘This research shows young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs.

‘Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a “poshness test” to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.’

The claims of a ‘poshness test’ were duly taken up by many in the media, who swallowed them whole. I actually read the report. It is remarkably free of specific evidence from named companies or about named individuals. Much of it is a simple statement of the obvious. Big City firms hire the sort of people who are likely to succeed in the work they do.

And since they can choose from huge numbers of applicants for every job, it is no surprise that they pick men and women from the best universities, who are confident, fluent and literate.

The sad truth is that such people come overwhelmingly from private schools and the tiny few remaining state grammar schools. Some others will come from the sort of schools favoured by our Left-wing elite, which pretend to be ‘comprehensive’ but in fact select on the basis of postcode, wealth or religion.

Something similar happens at the opposite end of the labour market. In such unposh sectors as the building trade, employers understandably prefer rigorously schooled Poles to the young victims of British bog-standard comprehensives. That is not the employers’ fault.

People’s fates in life are decided largely by their schools. And many must wish it were not so (as we shall see).

But Mr Milburn (who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school) is, like the whole British political class, a dogged supporter of comprehensive state education.

He can’t admit it’s been a disaster for the poor he claims to speak for. Instead, he blames the employers for picking the recruits they need, not the school system, for destroying the hopes of poor boys and girls early in their lives.

This is deeply unfair, as Mr Milburn’s own press release actually acknowledged in a less-noticed passage: ‘Some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest and best, regardless of background. They should be applauded.’

In fact, much of the report describes the considerable efforts made by such firms to encourage applicants from poorer backgrounds. And it flatly dismisses claims of old-fashioned snobbery.

There is a fascinating passage on judging people by their accents, in which one interviewee says such things used to happen but have now virtually died out.

The real dead hand of snobbery in this country is to be found among Left-wing elitists, dwelling in their warm pockets of state-funded privilege, refusing, after 50 years of failure, to admit that they are wrong about anything.

The REAL reason for gun massacres?

Another mass killing is followed by the usual thoughtless political and media responses. The last time I looked, the southern states of the USA contained plenty of people with stupid white supremacist views, most of them armed.

Indeed, this has been so for more than a century. At the same time, the past few years have seen gun massacres in this country (Hungerford and Dunblane), Finland, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, and knife massacres in China, a police state where guns are genuinely difficult to obtain.

So it would seem that blaming these events on widespread gun ownership and white racialism doesn’t quite work. If all these events were properly investigated (and few are, because conventional wisdom closes the minds of investigators), my guess is that almost all of the killers would be found to have been taking legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.

Often, as in the case of James Holmes, the Colorado cinema shooter, the facts don’t emerge for many months. Or the authorities refuse to release the killer’s medical history, as they have done in the Sandy Hook case.

Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston murderer, was recently arrested for possession of Suboxone, a drug given to opioid abusers, and suspected of causing personality changes and violent outbursts. A student at his high school described him as a ‘pill-popper’.

It is the use of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs that has hugely increased in recent years. Gun ownership and racial bigotry haven’t. Please think about this.

By scattering morning-after pills into the outstretched hands of girls as young as 13, the state believes it may at last bring down the numbers of unwanted pregnancies.

The signs are that this ferocious medical intervention, now to be given out to under-age girls by chemists, is working. And it is doing so where sex education has not just failed, but has been followed by an accelerating increase in the things it claims to prevent.

The pregnancy figures are falling at last, though sexually transmitted diseases continue to spread rapidly, suggesting that sexual activity is not declining.

Well, it’s success of a sort. We’re well on the way to the loveless nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which sex has been completely separated from the making of babies.

A few questions arise. Is there any remaining justification for sex education now we have turned pregnancy into an easily curable disease? And does anyone know what the long-term effect this potent chemical dose will have on the bodies of those who use it? Or are they unwittingly taking part in the trials that will find that out?

Don’t blame Rachel for our stupidity

I’m surprised that more people don’t emulate Rachel Dolezal and pretend to be black, or members of some other minority.

Our gullible society rushes to reward such status, often with jobs and money. As I am actually partly Cornish, I am frequently tempted to start some sort of Cornish liberation front in the Home Counties, where our language rights are badly neglected.

I fear to do it because it would probably work. Within months I’d have an EU grant and there would be Cornish-language library books in Stow-on-the-Wold. In which case I’d probably have to actually learn Cornish.

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The desperate, brave faces of Europe's secret crisis

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

We are ignoring a European crisis that is going to change all our lives irreversibly and for ever. It is the huge, tragic surge of African migrants across the Mediterranean.

Once inside the borderless European Union, these newcomers can and will settle anywhere. There is no law or power that can stop them.

I first became aware of this when I went to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. I had gone to tease Spain for moaning about Gibraltar,  while it had its own Gibraltar  in Morocco.

But much more serious was the virtual siege of Ceuta (and its nearby twin, Melilla) by migrants, immense numbers of them, crowding up against the 20ft fences which are all that separate this little piece of Spain from Africa.
They climbed. They swam round or paddled past the barricade in makeshift rafts. It was impossible to stop all of them getting through. They walk thousands of miles from all the many famines, massacres and civil wars (often started by us) which beset that tragic continent.

Following the building of an effective fence between Greece and Turkey, migrants from Asia and the Middle East who used to come through Greece are now also coming to Europe by sea alongside countless Africans.

This problem has grown much worse since we madly overthrew Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi (who tried to stop the refugees) and turned that country into a failed state with no control over its own coastline.

Official figures, probably severe underestimates, say 31,000 crossed from Africa to Europe in 2013. Some 42,000 have tried to reach Italy alone this year. Hundreds drown in the attempt.

It reminds me of how the US-Mexican border used to be 20 years ago, when they simply could not cope with the multitudes of economic migrants hurrying across the muddy dribble that is the Rio Grande. For in summer, the Mediterranean, like the Rio Grande, is no real barrier. If they can reach the north coast of Africa, they can reach Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they can get to Calais.

That vast illegal migration from Mexico helped to transform the USA into the bilingual, multicultural nation it has since become. Something similar may be in store for Europe.

Actually I admire the migrants’ bravery and determination. Nobody can blame them for wanting to leave their blasted war zones. Nobody, in turn, could blame the nations of Europe if they said they could not cope with them (for they cannot) and took serious steps to stop them coming.

As it is, the political leaders of the Continent prefer not to face the problem at all, leaving the worst-affected states to do what they can and hoping the problem will go away, while it gets bigger all the time. It would be a good start if we admitted that this is actually happening.

We MUST ask: What was their heroism for?

Since I first blundered  on to the edge of war, and saw what bullets do to human flesh and bone, I have given daily thanks that my generation never had to fight. These days, when I watch old films of D-Day, I imagine myself, trembling and gibbering with fear and cold, turning tail and running rather than face the German guns.

I still don’t know how they did it, soft human flesh running head on into hard, cruel metal.

And I also wonder, more and more, how it came about that young men found themselves having to do this horrible thing. And so, while I honour them for it, and understand why they had to do it, I do not honour those politicians whose vanity and stupidity made it necessary.

If we are serious about revering these men, and I am very serious about it, hasn’t the time come to look once again at the 1939 war, and how it came about, and whether it was as good a war as it is cracked up to be?

For if we don’t, how will we avoid the same thing happening again? In my experience, most of my generation still have a glamorised, idealised view of the Second World War that has little to do with what really took place.

Those who actually fought in it generally shut up about the horrid details. The only D-Day veteran I ever knew, asked to describe what it was like to step ashore at Arromanches that morning, would only say: ‘There seemed to be rather a lot of sand flies about.’

An equally eloquent silence is to be found in the war cemetery at Bayeux, where the terse and hopelessly sad inscriptions on the graves of all those 18-year-olds will reduce anyone to helpless tears in less than a minute.
 

Guns aren't the real mass killers

Here are two reasons to wonder if  ‘more gun laws’ is the right response to the increasingly frequent rampage killings  that seem to be happening almost everywhere, even though guns are no more common than they used to be.

One: According to the American news network ABC, Santa Barbara mass killer Elliot Rodger had been taking the mind-altering drug Alprazolam, a benzodiazepine. A large number of mass killers have been found – when investigated – to have been using legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.  In many cases the authorities have not bothered to find out, so the correlation might be even stronger.

Two: Canada already has tighter gun laws, yet there has just been a rampage shooting  in the quiet Canadian city of Moncton. Finland, as strict as Canada, and Germany, which has even tighter gun controls, have also been affected.

Could we for once actually think about this, instead of just reacting?

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President Barack Obama tells us we must stay in the EU to suit the needs of the USA.

And he tells Scotland it must stay in the UK for the same reason. Which part of ‘national sovereignty’ does this President not understand?

I wouldn’t blame Scots for voting ‘Yes’ just to make it clear that foreign politicians should stay out of their  business. For the rest of us it’s more complicated.
 The USA has been trying to cram us into a federal Europe  since the 1940s, for its own benefit, not ours.

But wasn’t it American  pressure that forced us to give in to the IRA in 1998, in an agreement that will lead, in the end, to Northern Ireland leaving the UK? Does one hand know what the other’s doing?

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An Interesting discussion of comparative murder rates in the US and Britain

I have many times pointed out that the official murder statistics in Britain (and also the suicide rates, as defined by mdoern coroners' verdicts) are open to question. Now an American correspondent has sent me a link to this interesting discussion of the subject, on which I invite comments:

 

http://rboatright.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/comparing-england-or-uk-murder-rates.html

If the Devil had to invent a game, it would be this one

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

If the Devil had his own bible, it would probably take the form of a computer game. It would be sly and witty, enjoyable and slick. It would start with small, almost funny misdeeds.

It would offer the player the joys of money, successful violence and easy, responsibility-free sex. There would be drugs which didn’t  fry your brain or burn holes in your nose.

You would be made to feel brave, while not actually needing to be. None of your pleasures would be paid for in coin, pain or grief.

Everyone else in the game would be disposable and forgettable. And it would contain one big lie. You would come out at the end happy and unharmed, and wanting more.

As I understand it, this is roughly what happens in the new, much-praised Grand Theft Auto V, now being played by thousands of 14-year-old boys in bedrooms near you.

Officially it’s for those aged 18 and over, but nobody takes that seriously in modern, child-hating Britain. If you haven’t got it, you’re not cool.

The shops were ready for the rush with great stacks of it. Parents who refuse to buy it for their sons can expect ballistic rage, stamping and sulking. Perhaps it will turn out to be a human right.

Would anyone care to say that this doesn’t matter?

It’s a curious coincidence that Aaron Alexis, the man who massacred 12 people in Washington DC last week, liked to play such games for hours on end (Call Of Duty was apparently his favourite).

As usual, the liberal media are more interested in the fact that he had guns than in what was in his head. Oh, quite – lots of people do this and don’t go out and murder their school-fellows or workmates.

I strongly suspect that the wretched Alexis (who was plainly unhinged in other ways, with voices in his head) was yet another victim of supposedly harmless and ‘soft’ cannabis, now virtually legal in much of the USA. And plenty of British 14-year-olds are playing that game, too – often with the connivance of their parents.

But these increasingly frequent incidents seem to me to suggest that what you put into someone’s mind makes a difference to the way he behaves.

For every one who goes on a rampage shooting, there are thousands whose school work goes off the rails, thousands who treat girls like toys, thousands who consider callousness, dishonesty and bad manners as normal.

Many years ago in a French seaport town, I saw what I still think was a vision of evil. In a grubby cafe a boy of about 11 or 12 was ceaselessly feeding coins into one of the crude gaming machines then available. His eyes were blank, the skin of his face was dry and horribly pale. He looked as if he rarely ate. He was (this was, after all, France) smoking a cigarette. I swore at that moment that I would protect any child under my authority from this influence.

Around the same time I found myself in a famine-stricken country – Somalia – and saw for the first time the great round eyes and swollen stomachs of children dying of hunger. In many ways the worst thing was that I was not shocked or moved enough. I had seen this too many times on TV.

I have known ever since that seeing things on screens desensitises us. There is no doubt. If evil is familiar, it is easier to bear and easier to do. It is in our imaginations that we use our consciences and work out how our actions will affect ourselves and others. Conversation, storytelling and reading strengthen our imaginations.

These games kill our imaginations, which help us to be kind, and replace them with the liquid manure of pure selfishness, which helps us to be cruel.

The police deserved their drubbing 

Are we allowed to criticise the police? My article on the subject last week was followed by squawks of outrage, to which I have replied at length on my blog.

Some claimed that I know nothing of the subject, when I have researched and written a substantial book about it. Some urged me to go out on patrol with officers (as if I haven’t done so here and abroad).

Many claimed – without a scrap of evidence – that my motives were low and greedy. Some sought to use emotional blackmail by mentioning the many officers who have died in the course of duty.

I grieve for these brave, much-missed men and women as much as anyone, and revere their memory. But their sacrifice doesn’t mean I cannot criticise the police or their methods.

Some journalists have died bravely too, but that does not put my trade above criticism. Far from it. And heaven forbid that it ever should be.

A welcome few of those who commented were thoughtful and reasonable. But to  the others I say that they sound very like the BBC, another nationalised industry trading on a reputation  gained many years ago and no longer entirely deserved.

Both these bodies need to remember that they serve the public, not the other way round.

Britain will continue to vanish behind the veil

Not many years ahead, the full Islamic face-veil, the niqab, will be as common here as the headscarf (the hijab) is now.

And quite a lot of non-Muslim women will probably have adopted the hijab too, as they will find it wise to do so in the areas in which they live.

This is going to happen. Nothing can stop it.

Islam is at home in this country and grows stronger every week.

When we replaced Christianity with ‘Equality and Diversity’ as our official belief, we abandoned the only argument we might have had against it.

I couldn't care less which of the three Left-wing parties is in government.

I doubt if Labour would ever have dared smash up the Armed Forces as the Coalition has done, but that’s the only difference I can see, and it’s happened now.

But my sense of fairness compels me to defend Ed Miliband against the babyish attacks now being made on him, mainly by media folk who bought shares in his Blairite brother David, and are still furious that their man was beaten in a fair fight.

Actually Ed’s shown real guts. He was the first party leader for years to refuse to toady to Rupert Murdoch’s papers.

He wants to get rid of the iniquitous political levy – something Margaret Thatcher tried and gave up because she was too scared. And whether he meant to or not, he stopped the Prime Minister taking us into a wholly idiotic war.

As far as I can work out from the feminist sisterhood, it’s not sexist to kill girls in the womb because they are girls. Beats me, but these people are a lot cleverer than poor old medieval  me, stuck with my certainty that such killing is murder, and wrong.

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