Cumbria Shootings.

Four days after Derrick Bird went on his shooting rampage that left twelve dead the people of Cumbria are still looking for meaning and asking why? Sadly there is no answer to that question.

It is fair to say though that over the past year Britain, as a nation, has been under a great deal of stress with the recession and the General Election. Cumbria has been affected more then most also suffering the floods of 2009 and the tragic death of two children in a school bus crash just two weeks ago. Derrick Bird seems to have been under the most stress of them all with the birth a grandchild re-opening the old wounds of a failed marriage, arguments over a family will, a job in a profession that was hit really hard by the recession along with the grinding tedium and intimidation of an investigation by HM Revenue & Customs. Against this backdrop of tension and desperation all that was needed was a simple trigger to turn a normally quiet man in to mass murderer. This could literally be anything and is normally something as small and insignificant as being unable to get through to a call centre or having to wait too long at the checkout. In this case I think the trigger was actually the Israeli attack on the aid ship. Not in any planned or organised way but the images on TV were just enough to make an already unstable man go out and shoot the lot of them.

As for the wider context of the incident that's more complicated. It looks as if unexpected events caused the whole thing to go off a week early and it was actually being planned as Britain's big set piece for the world cup. As such it was designed to promote discussion on a wide variety of topics including Britain putting across its version of events in the gulf oil spill. This presents me with a bit of a problem because if I publicly identify those topics then I encourage a discussion of them completing the plan and making me complicit in it.