Just when did children become so angry?
And just when did so many of them begin holding life in such low regard that they would kill in a moment of madness with a knife, a machete, or as we heard in the news this week… a screwdriver.
And not only destroy another life – destroy their own life in the process too.
The report on Monday of how a 17-year-old killed solicitor Peter Duncan after he held the door open for a youth at a shopping centre in Newcastle, seemed to be the epitome of the problem we now face.
That something in the way Mr Duncan, acted or looked was enough to prompt the teenager to kill is unfathomable. What level of
uncontrolled anger must have bubbled so close to the surface in him, that he could choose to murder with the same disregard he’d have for dropping a piece of litter?
He must have known that such
an act could lead to his spending the next two decades behind bars
and yet he apparently didn’t care.
What was more staggering about this modern horror tale was that the 17-year-old already had 31 convictions.
31.
He had once threatened his own mother with a knife and at the time of the killing was on bail for allegedly warning he would slash someone else. According to neighbours, police were
regularly called to the house.
But what on earth was he still doing in the house? What on earth was he doing walking the streets of Newcastle at liberty when he had already at least twice been involved in knife incidents?
As the judge said in court, Mr Duncan, a devoted dad of two, was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. And that is surely the truth. Because a kid with this much anger and this little respect for life was inevitably going to kill some time.
And those that preside over our courts have to start taking it seriously that there are now a
significant number of youngsters just like him who cannot be trusted to walk our streets.
The law states that the penalty for carrying a knife is up to four years in jail. And if jailing youngsters is what we have to do to prevent innocent members of the public being killed, then that is what we must do.
Yes of course we need a whole range of measures to prevent knife crime. We need properly funded youth services, we need to end the epidemic of school expulsions, we need to help parents bring up their children well, and we need to treat this as a public health issue.
We need to reduce their anger – and increase their regard for life.
But those things take a long, long time. And right now, we just need to make our streets safe so an ordinary dad like Peter Duncan can leave work at the end of the day, and make it home to his family.
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